


there's something in the water

by kindclaws



Series: mermaid au club [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Clarke blows up a building!, F/M, Mythical Beings & Creatures, mermaid!Bellamy, spoiler alert they're not actually weird feral nudists, surfer!Clarke, surfer!Octavia, trust me it is a thing that you will want
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-04 21:38:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 38,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4153923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindclaws/pseuds/kindclaws
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Let me get this straight," Wells says over the phone. "You think there's a colony of weird feral nudists that lives down the beach? And one of them is the long lost brother of your boss and you have a crush on him? And your other boss supplies them with clothing when they feel like interacting with regular society?"</p><p>	"Do you have any better ideas?" Clarke asks, and he doesn't, so weird feral nudists is what they're going with for now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In which Clarke deals with her parents' divorce by smashing Kane's car with a baseball bat and learning how to surf

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how to surf but the internet helped me out. I apologize for any and all mistakes.  
> Also, nothing against actual nudists. You do you.

The first time Kane meets Clarke Griffin, she's taking a baseball bat to the headlights of his car on the hottest day of the year so far.

He's picked up details about Clarke in snippets of conversation with Abby, knows that she likes watching baseball and played in a neighbourhood team when she was younger but quit to focus on art. He just never imagined she'd re-purpose her childhood sports equipment like this.

Kane stops a few meters back from his car, his hand still halfway into his pocket reaching for his keys. He watches Clarke thoroughly shatter the right signal light and rethinks his choices, pulling the hand out. He walks into her line of view, slowly, to make sure she doesn't accidentally (or otherwise) hit him in the head with the baseball bat.

She pauses for a moment as he approaches, straightening up her posture and adjusting her grip on the bat. In the photos he's seen she looked like an average teenage girl with a smile that bordered on a smirk. In person there's a certain strength to her that the camera couldn't capture properly, a flash of steel in her eyes. It might be the ripped jean shorts or it might be the mascara smeared across the arch of her cheekbones, or it might just be her. Kane has no way of knowing - it is, after all, the first time he's meeting Clarke Griffin.

Clarke eyes him warily, probably to see if he'll give her grief for destruction of private property, but there's no recognition in her eyes. So Abby hasn't shown her his photo. He doesn't know if that's a blessing or a curse.

"You seem pretty angry," Kane says mildly, eyeing the damage done to his front bumper.  
  
"No shit," Clarke snaps, all teeth and no softness.  
  
"I'm sorry," Kane says. "I just - I have to ask, why the car?"  
  
Clarke shrugs at that, and, having determined that he's probably not going to yell at her for methodically smashing a car in a public parking lot, spreads her feet apart in a determined stance and swings the bat again.  
  
"Well, look at it," she says in between swings, and Kane already is. "It looks expensive. He probably likes it."  
  
"It was a nice car," Kane agrees mournfully. He watches Clarke take several more swings before she grows exhausted and sets the head of the bat down on the concrete between her boots, panting under the sweltering summer sun. She scrutinizes him again, eyes narrowed under the glare of sunshine. It suddenly occurs to Kane that the mascara smears around her eyes might be from her crying, and he's struck with a powerful sense of regret.  
  
He loves Abby, enough to know that although she's had problems with her teenage daughter since her divorce, she desperately wants to repair that relationship. He never meant to make things worse, but he thinks he might have.

"The fuck are you still staring at?" Clarke asks. Kane looks at the car, at his shoes, back to Clarke again. The silence stretches.

"Have you smashed the back lights yet?" he asks eventually. Fierce delight lights up in Clarke's eyes.  
  
"No, good idea," she says, and squeezes between his car and the next one to make her way to the back. There's not a lot of room behind the car for her to swing the bat, but Kane hears the tinkle of shattered glass on concrete a moment later anyway.  
  
"Do you feel better now?" Kane asks when she returns. Clarke scowls at a seagull that flies overhead making the usual strangled squawking sound that seagulls make. She bites her lip and hefts the bat in both hands once more instead of answering. After she leaves a sizeable dent in the hood of the car, she lets it drop to her side and hangs her head. Her breath hitches, and Kane thinks she might be crying again.  
  
"No," she says miserably, and yes, she's crying again - he can hear it in her voice. "I'm just - I'm just really fucking pissed about everything. I thought the worst moment of my life was when my parents told me they were divorcing three years ago, but then I got a call from my mom and she wants me to live with her and her new asshole boyfriend this summer and it's _not fucking okay_."  
  
"That does sound rough," Kane says, wincing. In his mind, he is writing a long list of requests to Abby. Things like _please let me know when your daughter shows up several days before she was expected_ and _please hide the baseball bats_ and _when she realizes who I am and smashes my skull in please play Rolling Stones at my funeral even when my mother tries to convince you otherwise._  
  
"He might not actually be an asshole," Clarke says after a moment. "I don't know. I've never met him. And I mean, my dad's a great guy, so my mom's taste can't be that bad. But it still doesn't feel right. I don't want some new guy trying to play house with my family. I want my old one back."  
  
"My father died when I was thirteen," Kane says. "My mother never remarried, but she did try to date after a while, and everyone she brought home left a bad taste in my mouth. I know what you mean."  
  
They're both silent for a moment, regarding the many battle scars of Kane's beloved vehicle.

"Thanks Dr. Phil," Clarke says with a snort after a moment, but she does look at him and give him something of an amused smirk, so Kane thinks he hasn't done so bad. "Do you normally go around giving pep talks to teenage girls smashing cars with baseball bats?"  
  
Kane dips his hand in his pocket, feels his fingers brush against the warm metal of his keys.

"No," he says. "Just when it's my car."  
  
Clarke stands perfectly still as he walks past her and unlocks the driver's door. Her black-rimmed eyes are so wide that even through the cracked windshield he can see that they are exactly the colour of the vivid sky behind her head. The engine thrums to life, thankfully, because Kane wants to be gone before she regains her senses and control of the baseball bat.

She watches him pull out of the parking space, turning so she doesn't lose sight. He sees her in his side mirror, her torso cut in a jagged diagonal line by the crack running through it. It forms two visions of her, slightly offset. Just before he leaves the parking lot, both Clarkes throw the baseball bat down and their hands up in the air.

"Fuck!" she yells out to the sky, and it echoes in his ears as he drives away.  
  
Kane is not entirely sure that it is legal of him to be driving around with a car in this condition so he makes his way home quickly, squinting through the spiderweb cracks in the windshield. Once home, he waters all the plants on his balcony and rings up the first number on speedial on his phone.

Abby answers just as he accidentally knocks the potted fern off its stool, and he puts her on speakerphone while he picks it up and sweeps dirt back into place.

"I just met Clarke," he says by way of greeting.  
  
"Oh god, I forgot to tell you she arrived late last night! I was going to call you during my lunch break, but we had a car crash come in and - Marcus, how did it go?"  
  
Kane sets the fern back on its stool and exhales deeply, looking through the spokes of his balcony railing at the battered car in the driveway. He debates the merits of lying, then realizes Abby will see it before he can get it repaired anyway.  
  
"Is there any way she could have found out what my car looks like?"

"It's parked in my driveway on Google street view," Abby says, her tone coloured with confusion. "Marcus, she didn't egg it, did she?"

"Something like that," he says at last.

 

 

.....................

 

 

 

Clarke arrives in Walden after her exams end with the intention of hating it with every fiber of her being. But despite her best efforts, and the disastrous introduction to Marcus Kane, she finds herself accepting it as a necessary evil. Wells takes unnecessary glee in her suffering when they talk over the phone, and Clarke throws a sock across her bedroom and imagines she's throwing it at him.  
  
The first few mornings she goes for a run, she sticks to the streets of her mother's neighbourhood and loses herself in a blur of identical green lawns and the slap of her shoes against concrete. But she discovers the beach soon enough - Abby's house is close enough to the ocean that she starts running there instead. Her shoes sink in sand and make her work harder to jog, and she likes it that way.

There's a muscular guy with tattoos and skin the colour of umber that rakes the beach every morning, finishing up around the time she gets there, and since he seems like the kind of guy who would pick up broken glass if he found it, Clarke starts taking off her shoes and running barefoot instead.

There's something cathartic about hitting the ground running, feeling the warmth of the sunrise on her face and wet sand give underneath her weight as long as she still has the energy to put one foot in front of the other. If she's feeling goofy that morning Clarke strays closer to the waves that pull at the shoreline, gives a breathy laugh as cool water laps over her toes and drenches the backs of her calves when she kicks up spray. And the air - the air is better here. Her university is inland, and she doesn't get so much as a hint of wind there during the year, much less a sea breeze.

Slowly, one run at a time, Clarke feels all the anger she built up this year recede with the tide. As it fades it leaves her feeling empty, restless, and the bedroom Abby's set aside for her to paint in isn't enough.

It's stifling, and she wants desperately to paint, but nothing comes out right. Abby looks at her half-finished scraps, grudgingly pays her compliments, but Clarke shakes her head and tears them off her easel all over again. There's a disconnect between the storm in her head and the colours that swirl dizzyingly on canvas. And until she figures out why, she'll settle for the swirls in the shallow tidepools the ocean leaves when it recedes.

Two weeks after she arrives in Walden, the guy on the beach puts up a hiring sign in the window of the little beach shack that sells refreshments and rents out surfing equipment to the beachgoers that show up late after Clarke finishes her morning run. She has nothing better to do so she walks in.

His name is Lincoln, and at first it's hard to tell if he's doubting her seriousness in applying for the job or he's just always this hard to read. But Clarke's persistent, and he hires her with a long-suffering sigh.  
  
That's where she meets Octavia.

Octavia walks into the shack like she's a war goddess about to ride into battle. Clarke later finds out that this is the way Octavia walks into everything, but at the time she is still very new at her job and confused as to why this girl with flashing eyes and sun-kissed bare legs is barging into the shack before opening hours. _Rude._

"Oh fuck off, I own half the place," Octavia says when Clarke tries to shoo her out, and it's the start of a beautiful friendship.  
  
Well, not at first. Octavia looks at Clarke with disdain as she fumbles with drinks and mixes up receipts for rented equipment. Octavia's looks are both terrifying and arousing, and Clarke almost just throws her hands up and quits because both she and Lincoln are ridiculously attractive specimens who make out behind the counter when they think Clarke's on break and it's just too much for her to handle.

But then some asshole who's the exact epitome of a surfer dude minus any redeeming traits says something that rubs Clarke the wrong way, and long story short, she ends up burying her fist in his face. It's fantastic until she hears something in her hand crack.

Octavia drives her to the hospital, cackling like a maniac the whole way. She drives like she walks, expecting everyone and everything to get out of her way, and Clarke half expects even the potholes to get up and slink away in defeat. Clarke's hand turns out to be okay, which is great because she wasn't looking forward to explaining a cast to Abby.

So they drive back. Octavia stops her just before they walk into the shack.

"I've seen toddlers with more technique in their punches," she says bluntly.  
  
"Thanks," Clarke says. She's learned by now not to take Octavia's straightforward nature personally - it's just the way she is. She can admire that, actually, that she refuses to soften herself for anyone.  
  
"No, seriously, I got second hand embarrassment just from looking at you. We have to do something about that. I've got a friend who owns a boxing gym downtown, come with me and I'll show you a few tricks."  
  
When Clarke fucks up and accidentally gives some acne-prone thirteen year old an alcoholic pina colada that afternoon, Octavia scoffs and rolls her eyes, but there's a little more fondness in the gesture than before, so Clarke figures that in some bizarre, roundabout way, she's gained Octavia's respect. After they close up shop, they finish a bottle of rum between them, and Clarke tells her rapt audience about her first meeting with Kane.

Octavia throws her head back and laughs with her whole body, and even Lincoln shakes his head and smiles faintly at her, and Clarke runs home with a skip in her step that is partially from happiness but also because rum makes her feel like she's floating on a cloud.

Under Lincoln's careful tutelage, she gets better at her job. She learns the difference between a Chinese wax job and a Brazilian one - both are regularly seen on the beach, but one is for surfboards and one is for people, apparently. She reacts with the appropriate horror when Octavia stomps in soaking wet complaining about out-of-towners stealing waves she had priority on. She stops accidentally serving alcohol to adolescents who haven't yet figured out what deodorant is.

One morning she's early for her run because she tossed and turned all night and got bored of staring at the ceiling for hours, and someone is already on the water, their silhouette lit only by the lightening near the horizon.

Clarke slows from a run to a walk to standing still, squinting towards the figure in the distance. After a moment she realizes it's Octavia, so she probably doesn't need to contact the coast guard - Octavia's _seriously_ good at surfing - but she's not riding any waves. She's just sitting on her board, one leg on either side, bobbing up and down over small waves.

She's not alone, either.

Someone is in the water next to her, bracing their arms on her board. It's not Lincoln, but it's not anyone she can remember seeing around the shack either. The only identifying feature she can note at this distance is a mop of dark, curly hair weighed down by water.

Clarke doesn't see a second board, and they're awfully far out - most people get exhausted before they swim out that far. She would wonder if Octavia went out to rescue a stray swimmer if it weren't for the complete lack of urgency in their movements. They're just talking, heads bent towards one another with comfortable familiarity. Octavia doesn't seem in any hurry to come in so Clarke shrugs and leaves them to it.

Lincoln looks mildly surprised to see her on the beach so early, but it's not like he's going to complain if she helps him unstack beach lounges and drag them out in neat rows, so.

Octavia returns to shore about fifteen minutes later, a happy smile on her face, a relaxed roll to her shoulders. She starts chattering about slow waves today as she props her board up against the shack, but Clarke hardly hears her. She looks instead to the shoreline, searching for the second swimmer. There's no one left in the water and no one on the beach, and the inexplicable absence leaves her feeling unsettled for a moment.

But there's work to be done, and she pushes it out of her mind soon enough.

 

 

..................

 

 

 

Predictably, Clarke's slowly repairing relationship with her mother goes South. They've walked on eggshells around each other for so long that Clarke almost managed to lull herself into a false sense of security, and when at last she runs out of the house with tears prickling at the backs of her eyes, it hurts more than she thought it would.

She almost calls Wells, like she does whenever she has news good or bad, but then she remembers he's at some model United Nations conference that weekend and she doesn't want to bother him while he's getting his politics on.

She gravitates to the beach without really thinking, having initially picked a direction to run in at random, but she breathes easier when she tastes salt on her tongue and then her instincts don't surprise her anymore.

The sun has just set and the sky is awash with purple and deep blues. The beach is almost empty, everyone having packed up once the dying sun no longer warms wet skin, and Clarke wades into the water until the waves lap at the hem of her shorts and throws her arms out and _screams_. A couple having a romantic picnic higher up on the sand quickly packs up and leaves, but Clarke only thinks _fuck you too_ and screams again because the rawness in her throat feels good.

At last she lets her arms fall to her sides and closes her eyes and just focuses on the pull of water on her legs. She stays until she is shivering too violently to remain. For a split second after she opens her eyes she swears she sees a dark head above the waves turned towards her, but then a wave crests over the spot and she blinks and there is nothing.

Whatever. She's emotionally compromised. She's allowed to hallucinate strange things in the water.

The next day she asks Octavia and Lincoln to teach her how to surf, because she needs a hobby that involves spending long hours not at home. They take her request in stride, picking out a wetsuit in her size and one of the rental boards that's in better condition and setting it aside for her.

The first few days all they have her do is paddle out to the shallows and watch the waves break, over and over. Octavia points out the signs she's supposed to be watching out for, and Clarke listens intently, but mostly everything looks like water to her. After she expresses frustration at moving so slowly Lincoln hands her a wet rag and makes her wash down every single beach lounge, which she probably deserved for complaining, but still.

After that they teach her how to duck-dive so she stops getting pummeled by unexpectedly larger waves, and it goes against every instinct Clarke has - she went into this thinking the goal was to _not_ drown, but they assure her that plunging into waves is exactly what she should be doing at this stage in her learning so she grits her teeth and gets used to spitting out water. She'd already gotten sunburned when she first started working at the beach shack, but now her skin darkens with the long hours she spends out on the waves.

She comes home one evening and catches sight of her reflection and is suddenly struck by how much she looks like she belongs out on the waves with them. Her hair is stiff and crusted with salt, her nose is peeling dead skin and no matter how hard she scrubs in the shower she can't get the smell of the sea out. She turns out not to mind. It feels right, better than the unused sketchbooks that gather dust on her desk because she's given up on drawing imperfect things.

When she's not working in the shack, Octavia paddles out with her and Clarke learns how to catch whitewater and ride small waves to the beach on her stomach. She feels pretty ridiculous while the more experienced surfers get to stand up, but Octavia tells her that if anyone gives her shit for being a beginner, to punch them in the face and to keep her thumb tucked underneath this time, dammit!

"Sons of guns get cocky and forget they were beginners too," Octavia snorts when a pair of boys belly-plant spectacularly in the aftermath of a wave not far from them.  
  
"I can't imagine you as a beginner," Clarke declares, scanning the horizon for waves with one hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun. "I feel like you came out of the womb on a surfboard."  
  
Octavia snorts at that.

"I came out swimming, all right," she says, and her voice sounds a little weird. She clears her throat. "I picked surfing up pretty quickly, but don't let that get you down. I have - I have the ocean in my blood."  
  
"You really like it, huh," Clarke says softly as waves lap over her parted knees.

"It's the closest I can get to-" Octavia breaks off suddenly, looking stricken. She's not staring at Clarke but instead at the horizon where blue sky melts into bluer water.

"To what?"

"To my brother," she says after a moment, and then she won't talk about it anymore. Clarke drops the subject immediately, having had her fair share of unacceptable conversation topics.

And that's how the month of June passes.

 

 

..................

 

 

  
The night Clarke almost drowns is the night she finds out Kane and Abby are getting married.

When she thinks about it in hindsight she realizes it was coming all along, but she actively chose to ignore the signs - Kane moving stuff into the second closet of the master bedroom, walking outside for her run one morning and finding all his potted plants lined up on the porch, Abby growing accustomed to making three cups of coffee in the morning instead of just two.

The thing is, Clarke doesn't hate Kane. After their disastrous first impressions of one another, they get along surprisingly well. He levels Abby when she tries to pick a fight with Clarke, orders takeout and watches baseball reruns with her, and he agrees with most of her viewpoints on social issues - which is always a plus. He's a decent man.

But he's not her father, and the anger Clarke still feels towards her parents for divorcing itches underneath her skin. She can ignore it until Kane and Abby sit her down for a serious talk and then she sees the diamond on her mother's hand and it crashes over her like a breaking wave.

So she runs, because that is what Clarke does. Everything else she can destroy, can tackle on head-first and come out victorious. But when it comes to her mother, Clarke runs, because she doesn't know what else to do.

And it's the beach she ends up at, of course. She screams at the ocean for a few minutes but it doesn't work like it did last time, even when she starts picking up rocks and whipping them as far as she can into the dark waters. So she turns to the beach shack instead. It's locked this late at night, but Clarke has a key and she breathes in the scent of salt and board wax and rum when she lets herself in.

Her wetsuit is still damp from her practice earlier in the day, and it's cold on her skin as she pulls it on, but Clarke needs the distraction anyway. She finds her board leaning behind the counter, kisses it for good luck, and wades out waist deep.

The water is cold tonight, and choppy. She almost debates returning to shore - there's a storm brewing down the coast, and she shouldn't be surfing alone and in the dark, and these waves are harder than the ones she's practiced with Octavia and Lincoln - but something in the water draws her forward, paddling further and further out. Waves break over the tip of her board and send chilly spray over her face but she wipes at her eyes with the backs of her hands and keeps going.

And then, because Clarke's a fucking dumbass with anger issues, she decides to try standing up for a big wave that's approaching. She's practiced the tricky maneuver on solid sand hundreds upon hundreds of times at Lincoln's insistence, but never out on the water.

For one glorious moment she is riding the surface of the water, and then the waves send her board spinning sideways and her balance evaporates. She falls, feels the sting of hitting water hard on her shoulder. Clarke reaches blindly for her ankle, for the cuff that connects her to her board, but her fingers brush the hem of the wetsuit and keep going, and from there it's only bare skin. Panic laces through her as she realizes she forgot to put it on in her anger, and the part of her brain that's still functioning rationally knows there's a slim chance she'll find her board again in waves like these.

 _Swim!_ she tells herself, and her limbs flail wildly in response but Clarke keeps tumbling head over heels and in the darkness she has no way of knowing which direction is up. Her lungs burn in protest and her chest squeezes, desperately wanting to exhale the half-breath she managed to get before she went underwater. Her face breaks the surface of the water completely unexpectedly, and Clarke gasps for air, but another wave crests over her head just as she does and all she succeeds in is getting a mouthful of salt water and being flipped over again.  
  
Clarke keeps struggling for what feels like an eternity but is probably only a moment or two, and through the fear and the adrenaline she knows - she knows she's not going to make it on her own. She's going to become a statistic, a cautionary tale to other beginnings, the reason surf instructors double check their students' ankles before allowing them out on the water.

Her limbs grow sluggish, weakened by the burning in her lungs, and Clarke hates that she can't stop fighting even though she's exhausted by all measure.

And then something brushes her shoulder, and strong arms wrap around her waist and pull, and all of a sudden her head is above the water and she breathes again. She's so dizzy and weak from the lack of oxygen that while her rescuer drags her back to shore, all she can focus on is gasping for breath. Her rescuer has her on her back, and Clarke stares up at the sky and sees a dizzying amount of stars and thinks _oh my god_. The moon is nearly full tonight, and it's so bright she thinks she could cry.

She might actually be crying. It's hard to tell, her face is covered in salt water as it is.

Her heels drag on solid sand first, and then she and her rescuer fall together in a tangle, just far up the shore that her head is in no danger of going under water but waves lap at her legs. Her rescuer looms over her, large, warm hands smoothing wet strands of hair away from her face. Even in the moonlight she can see that he's gorgeous in an entirely unfair way - dark eyes that shine in the darkness and a pair of parted lips and a bare chest that heaves with every breath. Then she sees the dark curls on his head and realizes this is the man she's seen talking to Octavia when she's out on her surfboard way before dawn.

"Can you breathe?" he asks urgently, one hand cupping her cheek and shaking slightly.  
  
"Yeah," Clarke manages to croak out, and then thinks maybe she should have said no so he'd give her CPR. The man lets out a relieved snort and ducks his head, and she feels wet curls brush against her collarbone. He smells like salt and fish. After a moment he raises his head again and looks at her. Clarke's pretty sure there's seaweed in his hair, but her hands are too tired to reach up and pick it out.  
  
"Don't fucking surf alone at night, you idiot," he tells her, but something in the furrow of his eyebrows tells her the harshness of his voice is more from worry than anger.  
  
"Noted," Clarke rasps, and the man shakes his head and props himself up on his arm, looking back at the ocean. At this angle she sees something she hadn't noticed before - dozens of tiny red scratches on his neck, running from just below his ear to his Adam's apple. Did he injure himself getting to her?  
  
"I have to go," he says. "Call Octavia, now, tell her what's happened."  
  
"Wait," Clarke says. "You're hurt-"  
  
Something cool and scaly brushes against her feet and she jerks them away on instinct. The man gives her one last look and then he practically throws himself into the water and is gone. Clarke sits up, gingerly, because every part of her is battered and sore, and stares at the receding waves in complete and utter confusion. She waits for him to surface, and he just doesn't. _Something does not compute._

"What the literal fuck," Clarke says, and she starts crying because her teeth are chattering violently and she almost just drowned and Octavia is probably going to kill her.  
  
She limps back to the beach shack and peels the wetsuit off first, then wraps herself up in three rental towels and curls up behind the counter, shaking. Clarke jabs her fingers at her phone screen in the wrong place several times before she manages to dial Octavia's number because her tremors are so powerful.

"I thought you were a goody two-shoes who went to bed at like, 9 pm," Octavia says by way of greeting. Clarke's glad there's no hint of sleepiness in her friend's voice. "It's midnight, what are you doing awake?"  
  
"Can you come to the beach shack?" Clarke says instead of answering, because her teeth are still chattering and she can't manage much more than that.  
  
"What's wrong?" Octavia demands.  
  
"Just come," Clarke says, and hangs up because she's crying again. She's ninety percent sure she's in shock and it sucks but for some reason her rescuer's words stick in her mind while all other thoughts roll away like raindrops on a pane of glass. _Call Octavia, tell her what happened._ Octavia will make it all better, Clarke's sure.  
  
While she's waiting, Clarke fumbles with her phone some more and calls Wells twice, both times hanging up before the second ring. She's scared and she wants her oldest friend, but she also doesn't know what to say - I just almost drowned and some weird guy pulled me out of the ocean and then swam back into it and vanished? If anyone told her that she'd be sure they were crazy. But she knows what she saw. She just doesn't know what it means.

Wells calls her back, and she hangs up on him. A moment later, her phone lights up with a text.

 _Hey, what's up?_ he asks.

_Pocketdial, sorry._

It's brisk and curt and he deserves better, but her fingers are blocks of ice and she can't manage to text much more than that. Luckily he leaves her alone, and a moment later Clarke hears the door to the beach shack fly open.

"Clarke!" Octavia all but yells, storming in. The second pair of footsteps tells Clarke that Lincoln's come as well.  
  
"Here," Clarke rasps, and when Octavia comes behind the counter and sees her curled up in the corner, she starts crying again.  
  
"Holy fuck, Clarke," Octavia says, immediately kneeling down beside her and pulling her into her arms. "Are you hurt? What happened? Why are you here?"  
  
"Went surfing," Clarke slurs, and Octavia's arms go stiff around her. She can't see Lincoln's face through the curtain of Octavia's hair that's covering her eyes, but she hears his disappointed sigh.  
  
"Are you crazy?" Octavia demands, her voice as hard as iron. "Alone, and at night, and with waves like these? Fuck, Clarke, even I wouldn't do that!"  
  
"Octavia," Lincoln says quietly. "It's not the time."  
  
The lectures pauses momentarily while Octavia helps her dry off and Lincoln finds warm clothes for her to change into, but Clarke can tell by Octavia's jerky movements and the hard line of her jaw that she's furious with her.

"How did you even survive?" she asks.  
  
"Got pulled out," Clarke croaks. "Some guy. Brown eyes, curly hair. Really fucking pretty. Said I should call you."

The string of curse words Octavia lets out could level a small city.

"I'm going to kill my brother," she declares, and Clarke is confused because whenever Octavia's brother has come up in previous conversations, he's always talked about like he's gone, but if he was the man who pulled her out of the water then...  
  
"Don't kill him," Lincoln says.  
  
"I'm going to," Octavia insists. "And then I'm going to kill Clarke for putting him in danger."  
  
"I doubt he was in danger,"  
  
"What if he'd been beached?! What then, Lincoln!"  
  
"Then he'd strip and walk back in."  
  
Clarke doesn't understand anything that's happening but she does understand that Octavia is angry and scared and that makes her scared too. Lincoln is the only one who keeps his calm, giving short, simple solutions to the increasingly drastic and nonsensical situations Octavia keeps suggesting, and in the end she storms out of the shack, stomping the whole way.

"I'm sorry," Clarke says. Now that she's warmer she's stopped chattering quite as much, and it's easier to talk. "I didn't mean to... Hurt anyone."  
  
"She'll come around," Lincoln says quietly, and he helps her into his truck. Clarke's thankful the ride to her house is short, because she's not sure she could have handled another minute of sitting sandwiched between Lincoln and Octavia in stony silence.  
  
Abby's bedroom is dark, and Clarke doesn't feel like waking her and explaining what's happened, so she sneaks in through the window instead and curls up under her covers. The next morning her bed stinks of the ocean, and she wakes up nauseous and vomits in the toilet because the smell of it clogs her nose and for a moment she thinks she's back underwater with burning lungs and unresponsive limbs.

 

 

 

...............

 

 

 

By unspoken agreement, that's the end of Clarke's surfing lessons.

The next morning she comes in to work a little unsure if she'll be welcomed back. Her board is unexpectedly propped up against the wall of the beach shack, which surprises Clarke because she didn't think she'd be seeing it again. Octavia carries it inside when she arrives and sets it on a rack with all the other rental boards and doesn't look at Clarke the whole day, and that's that.  
  
It's like when she first started working here, except worse because now she misses the easy camaraderie she had with Octavia. Lincoln tries to mediate between them but his efforts only go so far, and Clarke slinks home at the end of the day and makes halfhearted conversation with Abby and Kane at dinner. Wells seems to pick up on her unhappiness over the phone, and asks if there's anything he can do to make it better, but Clarke doesn't even know how to articulate what's wrong.

For a few days she reverts her morning runs to Abby's neighbourhood, well away from the beach, but she can't quite stay away, so instead she runs along the packed sand where the tide has rolled out, close enough to the water that her feet don't sink in softness but never touching the waves. She finds herself caught in a strange limbo, afraid of the crashing waves but unable to stay away.

Two slow weeks crawl past, and then Octavia and Lincoln start getting ready for something they call the 'Midsummer Swing' with varying degrees of cynicism. From what Clarke can gather, it's a giant party on the beach and all of Walden is invited. It's intense, and better yet, it's a distraction she snatches up with glee.

She and Lincoln put their art skills to good use and paint giant banners to string up around town advertising the party, while Octavia covers the beach shack in a rather repulsive amount of fake tropical flowers and cutout pineapples. The display is nauseating to look at and Clarke loves it. She spends the last week before the party tripping over lanterns, and then, unexpectedly, the night arrives.

People start arriving in droves as the sun starts to set, and Clarke is a flurry of movement - helping Lincoln set up last minute refreshment stands, trying to convince some teenage pyromaniac that the bonfire definitely does not have to be that big - _what are you trying to do, be seen from space???_ \- and lining the edge of the beach with all the little lanterns she kept finding underfoot.

It's dusk when Lincoln declares them free to party with a perfectly straight face that sends Clarke into breathless giggles - and she finally takes a moment to admire their work. The beach is gorgeous and otherworldly, lit only by the bonfire and the tiny candles at the edge, and something about people's silhouettes darting past the fire is entrancing.

She pours herself a small cup of rum and watches the festivities with a smile on her face. About an hour in, she notices a scraggly group of people walking up the beach from the dark end. The direction they're coming from is odd in itself - it's the one that has no road leading to it and most people avoid it because it's rocky and has no lifeguards - but stranger still is their mismatched clothing. There are four boys and two girls, all of them barefoot and loose-haired, wearing bathing suits and sun-bleached tshirts and blindingly white grins. Clarke swears she's seen Lincoln wearing those exact same boardshorts - all of them, and they sit low on the hips of the two lighter-skinned boys who are more gangly than the darker ones - and Octavia was wearing that tshirt two days ago.

The group of late-comers disperses into the crowd of people already gathered around the bonfire, and Clarke begins to wonder if her bosses are part of some huge orgy full of beautiful people that really like sharing clothes. It's a working theory, but the only one she's got by the time she's suddenly pulled out of her thoughts by someone coming to stand right in front of her.

Clarke looks up, and her heart skips a beat when she recognizes him.

"You look good when you're not coughing saltwater into my face," he says by way of greeting, and sticks his hand out.  
  
"Thanks," Clarke says, sarcasm creeping into her tone as she takes the hand and shakes it. Despite herself a smile twinges at the corners of her lips. "I'm Clarke."  
  
"Bellamy," her rescuer says, letting go of her hand so he can sit on the log next to her. There's not really enough room on it for both of them, but Clarke scoots over for him anyway and takes a long sip of rum to distract herself from the warmth of his thigh pressed along hers. He still smells like salt and fish. She stares at his boardshorts again. Yes, those are definitely Lincoln's.  
  
"So, Bellamy. I have to ask - Why are you wearing my boss' bathing suit?"  
  
He barks out a laugh, and it's so reminiscent of Octavia's that it makes her heart squeeze.

"Lincoln disapproves of nudity on his beach," Bellamy says with a side wink, and Clarke has to drink again because her cheeks are burning at the thought. Bellamy's even more beautiful by the light of the bonfire, and he's not alone, either - all of the barefoot strangers who arrived with him are fiercely captivating. There's a willowy Latina dancing with a scruffy-haired surfer by the water that Clarke is pretty sure belongs on a catwalk, and an Asian boy with exquisite cheekbones sits in the lap of one of the other boys whose dark skin practically glows in the light of the fire, and they're all fucking gorgeous.  
  
"Is Octavia still mad at us?" Bellamy asks then, the teasing note gone as his voice lowers. Clarke sighs into her red cup.

"Yeah," she says dejectedly.  
  
"I figured," Bellamy responds. "She hasn't come out to see me in a week."  
  
Clarke involuntarily looks towards the ocean, where she's seen Octavia sitting on her surfboard, talking to the boy in the water so many early mornings.

"The ocean's a strange place for a conversation," she remarks lightly. Bellamy shrugs, and his shoulder brushes against hers.

"It's the best arrangement we've got," he says, and Clarke thinks of deep, dark waters and shudders. He must notice, because he gives her a concerned look.  
  
"I'm fine, just been kind of weird about the water since... You know," she says, trying for a light tone. Bellamy looks towards the water, silent. After a moment he plucks the cup of rum out of her hands, drinks it all while she exclaims, and sets it down in the sand at their feet. "Excuse me."  
  
"Liquid courage," Bellamy says flippantly. "That's what alcohol is." He stands up and offers her a hand with an expectant look. "Are you coming?"  
  
"Coming where?"  
  
"I'm going to throw you into the ocean," Bellamy says. He seems to think for a moment and then add on, "With your permission, of course."  
  
Clarke should probably say no and make him go away, but something in her - the same something that made her take extra classes last semester because they said she wouldn't be able to handle the workload, that made her take a baseball bat to Kane's vintage car and punch a surfer in the face for belittling her - something makes her take his hand and stand. Fuck the ocean, she's not scared of it.

He doesn't let go of her hand as they walk past the bonfire and down to the water, and Clarke swallows down the butterflies in her stomach.

"I'm going to be right beside you the whole time," Bellamy says, letting go of her hand to yank Lincoln's t-shirt over his head. His hair looks even more rumpled afterwards, and Clarke wants to run her hands through it and untangle all the knots. "And if it's too much, you tell me and we'll go back to the shore. Sound good?"  
  
"Just fine by me," Clarke says determinedly, kicking off her sandals and stripping off her own t-shirt. She's glad she kept the habit of wearing a bathing suit to work even after she stopped going into the water, because she's not sure she could be remotely this confident in front of Bellamy in her bra and underwear.  
  
They walk out slowly until the waves lap at their thighs, and then Clarke takes Bellamy's hand again because she can feel the undertow swirling around her ankles and tastes salt in her mouth all over again.

"All right there?" Bellamy asks, and she nods fiercely, aiming for the same ferocious tenacity she sees in Octavia.  
  
The water is freezing, and Clarke remembers the feeling of it in her lungs and stops walking forward, sucking in a breath as her waist warms to the temperature.

"Clarke?" Bellamy asks, and she thinks he might say something after that, but if he does she doesn't hear because she ducks underwater and hears only her ears pop. The cold is a shock to her face, and she feels like she's just woken up from a long sleep. It feels - it feels _right_. Bellamy has an odd look on his face when she surfaces again, something halfway between awe and respect.

"I'm good," she says, grinning at him, and he grins back. "I'm good, but I'm also really fucking cold, can we go back?"  
  
He laughs at that again.  
  
"Damn, I wanted to get you swimming so I could race you and kick your ass," he says.  
  
"I could be an Olympian for all you know," Clarke tells him. He smirks and throws an arm around her shoulders as they wade back to shore. He's as hot as a furnace, and Clarke doesn't understand how, but she wraps an arm around his waist anyway and huddles close for warmth.

"An Olympian of the athlete kind, or of the immortal god kind?"

"Either would work. Don't get cocky."

"Cocky implies confidence where there shouldn't be any, and I'm quite sure that I've earned every bit of confidence I have," Bellamy taunts.  
  
"Yeah, well, we'll see how much confidence you have left when I kick your ass next time," Clarke responds.  
  
"There's going to be a next time?"  
  
"Well. Yes?"

The long-limbed Latina she saw earlier strides towards them as they're getting dressed and Clarke's shaking sand out of her sandals. Up close she's even more intimidating, and Clarke especially admires what looks like a necklace of tiny broken seashells around her neck.

"Octavia's looking for you," she says. "She tried to be pissed at the rest of us for showing up but we won her over, so it looks like you'll get the full brunt of her anger. Have fun."

"Thanks for having my back, Raven," Bellamy says with a scowl, but there's no real bite to his bark. He heads off higher along the beach, headed towards Octavia's silhouette, and the Latina - _Raven_ , Clarke reminds herself - turns her attention towards Clarke instead.  
  
"So you're Bellamy's surfer girl," Raven says, looking her up and down. Clarke is ready to get defensive when Raven smiles crookedly and sticks a hand out for her to shake. Like Bellamy, her skin is bizarrely warm, and Clarke's hand feels a little empty when they let go.  
  
"Clarke," she introduces herself.  
  
"I know," Raven tells her. "I've watched you surf. You're kind of terrible."  
  
Clarke can't help but laugh at that, because it's a little ridiculous, but Raven's apparently gotten distracted because she drifts away without saying goodbye. Octavia's loud voice echoes down the length of the beach, and Clarke finds her standing apart from the party, waving her hands frantically at a suitably chastised-looking Bellamy. She can't quite tell what the words are over the music and the chatter from the party, but Octavia looks worried more than she looks angry, and Clarke thinks that's a good thing.

A moment later the Blake siblings embrace, and Clarke looks away. She hopes Octavia forgives her soon too, because she really misses her friend.

But she made a promise to herself to enjoy tonight, so she squares her shoulders and marches into the crowd of teenagers and loses herself to the music. Something about dancing sets Clarke free - when she and Wells were in high school she was always dragging him out to wild parties and he indulged her because Wells is one of those rare people who desires nothing more than to see the people he loves happy, but she's pretty sure he never felt the music like she does.

Clarke dances until she notices Bellamy standing off to the side, watching her, and when their eyes meet she feels something jolt through her and she's suddenly so breathless she can't dance anymore. She makes her way out of the crowd of dancers, evading gyrating hips and wandering hands.

"Hey," Clarke says, giving him a smile.  
  
"I'm glad you came out on your own," Bellamy deadpans. "I was working up the courage to dive in there and get you, but I would have been accosted by horny teenagers and forced to dance."  
  
"There are worse fates," Clarke says mildly, and Bellamy grins at that. His teeth are bizarrely sharp, she's not entirely sure what to do with that information so she files it away in her mind carefully.

"I like you, but not nearly enough to risk that. I don't dance. Anyway," Bellamy says, sticking his hands in the pockets of Lincoln's boardshorts. "I guess this is goodbye. Octavia's making us go home."  
  
"It's not even midnight," Clarke exclaims in a scandalized tone when she pulls out her phone to check the time.  
  
"We're learning from Cinderella's mistakes," Bellamy replies breezily, and she snorts.  
  
"Things are good with you and Octavia now, right?" Clarke asks after some hesitation. Bellamy nods and looks back out towards the ocean.  
  
"She's protective of me, of all of us. I'm sorry she took it out on you," Bellamy explains. "I'm afraid she learned it from me - I was terribly overbearing when we were younger and now she thinks that's how she's supposed to express affection."  
  
"If you can go around rescuing strange girls from drowning, you can probably handle yourself."  
  
"I can. But she's scared that what happened to her will happen to me," Bellamy says quietly, and if that's not the most ominous thing to say to someone you've only met twice, Clarke doesn't know what is. But before either of them can say anything more, Raven is calling for Bellamy from down the beach. They turn towards her in unison, and Clarke sees that all of the latecomers have already gathered on the dark end of the beach and are waiting for Bellamy.  
  
He ruffles her hair in one unexpected, fluid motion, and he's close enough that she can smell the ocean on him underneath that of woodsmoke from the bonfire. She breathes in deeply without really thinking about it, but he's already pulling away. Clarke watches him jog towards the others without a backwards look, and then all of the barefooted latecomers melt into the darkness, as though they were never here.

Octavia comes up to join her a moment later, stands close enough that their shoulders brush.

"We haven't talked in a while," she declares, staring into the darkness. "We should do that."  
  
Clarke doesn't think Octavia is capable of apologizing like normal people, and that this is the closest to a sorry that she's going to get, so she wordlessly grabs her friend and embraces her tightly. Octavia winds her thin arms around Clarke's neck and remains there for another moment, and just before they step apart Clarke realizes that Octavia has that same unusual smell as Bellamy, only that it's harder to notice under shampoo and sun lotion. She has no idea what to make of that.

Later she and Octavia are picking up red cups off the beach, after everyone has gone home. Clarke is dead tired and she's glad she doesn't have to drive home because her eyelids keep threatening to drop, but even through her exhaustion she sees Lincoln walking down the dark end of the beach, a large pile of clothing in his arms. Right on top are the boardshorts Bellamy was just wearing, and Clarke thinks she recognizes Raven's shirt in there too.  
  
Lincoln walks right past her with the clothing, raising an eyebrow as though daring her to say something. But she remains silent as he dumps the clothing into the beach shack and locks it up behind him.

Wells laughs his head off when she tells him about it two days later. Clarke rolls her eyes and holds her phone away from her ear because _rude_.

"Let me get this straight," his voice is a little distorted by the phone, but it's still him and Clarke misses him. "You think there's a colony of weird feral nudists that lives down the beach? And one of them is your boss' brother, and you have a crush on him? And your other boss supplies them with clothing when they feel like interacting with regular society?"

"Do you have any better theories?" Clarke asks, pointedly ignoring the jab at her having a crush - she absolutely does not, shut up - and he doesn't come up with anything much better than that, so they give up and Wells starts complaining about the neighbour's dog who keeps barking and waking him up in the mornings. 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any theories on what Bellamy and co. actually are? I think I made it way too obvious, but meh. This is going to be a pretty short story, maybe three chapters. It was going to be a oneshot but the scene with Kane's car alone turned out to be over 1k and I was like 'mmm maybe not'.
> 
> Title from 'The Water' by Hurts. I listened to it on repeat while writing this. The counter says 56 times. Welp.


	2. In which Clarke is shown up by a six year old, performs emergency medical procedures and probably ruins absolutely everything

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the update delay! I unexpectedly moved into my new house this week, it took a few days to clean up. It's 100 years old and super sketchy and I love it. Except for the fact that we have to leech wifi off the university building across the street and it's quite unreliable.
> 
> CONTENT WARNING for mild description of injury and medical attention! I'd say it's not nearly as graphic as the show has been so you're probably good. There's swearing, but like, teenagers, so that shouldn't be unexpected. Lots of emotional constipation.

On the morning of the tenth, Clarke gets an email.  
  
She reads it over carefully, twice, savouring every word. It's rare that her father gets internet access, rarer still that they happen to be online at the same time, with the time difference, so these emails are the closest she gets to him.

He's included photos, as well, and she clicks through them, her face unconsciously mirroring his own smile in a selfie he took with a curious giraffe, her mouth forming an astonished 'o' at the sight of gorgeous sunrises over the savannah and vast herds of wildebeast with tiny black birds perched on their backs. She clicks through them several more times, lingering on the ones where Jake's face shows, often in the corner and in poor lighting. He never did get the hang of selfies, and in high school she was embarrassed by all the dumb photos he'd send her over the course of the day, but now they only make her fondly smile.

At the end of his message, he asks Clarke to send his love to Abby, and at this, her smile fades.

 _If you had loved her, you would be here and you could tell her yourself_ , she thinks, but she closes the laptop and goes to work instead. The sun is just rising, and Clarke looks at it and wonders if on the other side of the world, Jake is watching it set.

 

 

.....................

 

  
Clarke likes to think of herself as a clever person. She scored above average on her SAT scores back in high school, usually guesses who the murderer is before Wells when they sit down to watch crime drama together on their respective laptops in their respective rooms in their respective states, and she's in fucking pre-med.

But a six year old figures out the mystery of Luna Beach before she does, and, well, that's embarrassing.

Maya Vie and her father Vincent live two doors down from Abby. Vincent is quiet and tends to keep to himself, but his daughter is beloved by the entire neighbourhood. Clarke knows Maya because she's often drawing hopscotch grids in chalk on her driveway when Clarke walks home from work and always waves at her and asks if she wants to join in. Clarke's not really one for hopscotch, but she does sit down and draw her a purple and pink unicorn once, for fun, and Maya adores her after that.

When Vincent tells Clarke that he got called in for overtime and he needs someone to watch his little girl for a few hours, Clarke agrees readily.

"Maya's got a bit of a cold, but I've left chicken soup on the stove and she's not the grouchy kind of patient," Vincent promises.  
  
"No problem," Clarke says with a laugh. "I'm going to be a doctor, may as well start now, right?"  
  
The very first thing Maya does after Vincent leaves is pull out a play stethoscope from under her bed and demand that Clarke check her lungs. Clarke puts on her best serious face and tries not to grimace at the fact that the plastic stethoscope was made for much smaller heads than hers and is kind of stabbing her ears. She listens diligently to Maya's breathing before pulling away and declaring that she'll make a full recovery.

"That's good," Maya says, clearly looking relieved. "I started rewatching all my movies and I don't want to die before I finish."  
  
Clarke chokes on her laughter and makes a mental note to tell Wells about this - kid's got her priorities straight. She can't wait until Maya grows up and finds out netflix exists.

Maya gives Clarke a detailed tour of the house and especially her bedroom, introducing her to each stuffed animal in turn, stopping to cough throatily every few minutes. She grows exhausted quickly and allows Clarke to wrap her up in blankets and set her on the couch.

"All right, what are we watching today?" Clarke asks, eyeing a sizeable stack of Disney dvds beside the TV.  
  
"The Little Mermaid!" Maya says. "The second one, because Melody looks like me."

Crab orchestra it is. Clarke loads the movie, quietly humming 'under the sea' as Maya kicks her feet against the couch. When she sits down, Maya plops her head down in Clarke's lap without hesitation and it warms her heart. Clarke misses the first few minutes of the movie because she's busy stroking Maya's hair, which is probably a good thing because Melody is making poor life choices on-screen.

Maya grows hungry halfway through the movie and asks for chicken soup, which Clarke is only too happy to oblige. Maya clambers into her designated seat, still wrapped up in her many blankets, and sniffles loudly as Clarke heats up lunch.

"Sure you don't want to blow your nose?" Clarke asks with a meaningful look at the box of tissues on the table.  
  
"Not in front of guests," Maya says wisely, and Clarke offers to go into the other room if it bothers her, but Maya is quite determined to keep her nose on lockdown. Clarke sits down across the table and watches Maya slurp her soup with gusto.

"Is Ariel your favourite princess?" she asks after a minute.

"It's a tie between Jasmine and Ariel because Jasmine looks more like her but Ariel's _actually_ a mermaid," Maya explains, and Clarke furrows her eyebrows together in confusion. "I wrote Walt Disney a letter saying they need to make more brown mermaids but then I spilled apple juice on it and I didn't want to send it anymore in case they laughed at me. I drew pictures of everyone, do you want to see?"

Before Clarke can answer, Maya's already thrown off all the blankets and is tearing through the house in search of her drawings. She returns a moment later with a stack of several slightly crumpled papers covered in crayon. Maya has the average amount of drawing talent found in six year olds, but Clarke still has no trouble recognizing both Ariel and her dark-haired daughter, complete with green and red tails. Jasmine and her tiger have their own page as well, but it's the third drawing that makes Clarke raise her eyebrows.

"These are really good, Maya. Did you make your own mermaid princess?" Clarke asks, tilting the third page so Maya sees who she's talking about. It's a mermaid with a long, fanning tail, and Maya has mixed together blues and purples and pinks into a gorgeous spectrum that reminds Clarke of betta fish. The mermaid's upper half is a mix of the peach and the brown crayons shaded lightly over one another, with a long black ponytail that floats away in blue water that Maya started colouring in and apparently got distracted half way through.  
  
"I didn't make her up!" Maya giggles, like Clarke's question is the most ridiculous thing she's ever heard. "She really exists, silly! I met her!"  
  
"Oh, my bad. Was she nice?"

"She was so nice," Maya says, nodding smartly and gazing at the drawing with unparalleled adoration. "Dad took me to the beach last summer and I wasn't supposed to go into the water because I don't know how to swim, but the wind took my ball away and I had to get it back so I ran into the ocean and I almost drowned but she carried me closer to shore. We didn't have time to talk but saving someone's life is the nicest thing you can do, so all the other mermaids probably really love her."  
  
For some reason an image of Raven flashes into Clarke's mind, and she stares at the drawing blankly, seeing a long, dark ponytail and a teasing smirk and -  
  
"How do you know she was a mermaid, Maya?" she asks quietly, her hand trembling on the piece of paper.

"Because I saw her tail, _obviously_ ," Maya says as she scrapes her spoon around the bottom of her bowl. She sticks it in her mouth and sucks when she's finished, giving Clarke an unimpressed look that wordlessly says _Come on Clarke, get with the program_.

It's the tiny, uneven pink lines on either side of the mermaid's neck that convince Clarke. She remembers Bellamy the night he pulled her out of the water, thinking he was hurt because his neck was flushed red. _Gills_ , Clarke thinks, and feels suddenly dizzy. _Fucking hell_.

"Can we finish the movie now Clarke?"  
  
"Yeah," Clarke says, shaking her head to dispel her thoughts. She stares at the TV for the remainder of the movie but sees nothing, her mind playing repeats of every strange interaction - Lincoln's clothes, the fact that she's never seen a board or Bellamy's lower body when Octavia's out in the water talking to him, the brush of scales against her feet the night she nearly drowned. Now it all seems so obvious, and yet, she can't accept that as the answer.  
  
Maya falls asleep a few minutes before the movie ends, her head in Clarke's lap and her breaths loud and sniffling through her stuffed nose. Clarke pets her hair absentmindedly and then reaches for her phone, pulling up Google. She hesitates for a moment, and searches up _mermaids_.

Unhelpful.

_Mermaid lore._

_Mermaids rescuing people._

_Mermaids Luna Beach_

When the front door swings open and heavy boots stomp onto the welcome mat, Clarke startles. Maya stirs halfheartedly in her lap but settles back into slumber, her dark eyelashes fluttering. Clarke slips her phone away and puts on a relaxed smile as Vincent comes into the living room. His cheeks split into a warm beam when he sees Maya sleeping, and he kneels in front of the couch and plants a kiss on her forehead.

"Still feverish, huh kiddo?" Vincent remarks quietly, pressing his hand to the spot he just kissed. "How was she?"  
  
"She was great, don't worry. We ate soup and watched The Little Mermaid and she showed me her drawings," Clarke says. "She's a sweet kid."  
  
"She gets that from her mom," Vincent says with a sad smile. He slips one hand underneath Maya's knees and the other around her shoulders, and lifts her up in a tangle of blankets. Clarke's lap feels a little cold and empty as she watches Vincent carry his daughter upstairs.  
  
He returns a moment later, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand.

"How much do I need to pay you?" Vincent asks.  
  
"No, it's fine," Clarke quickly says. "I have a job at the beach and hanging out with Maya is more play than work."  
  
"You sure?" Vincent asks, and Clarke nods because the poor man is swaying on his feet and looks like he wants nothing more than to go upstairs and take a very long nap.  
  
"Well there is one thing I wanted to ask you about," Clarke says, looking down at her feet and hoping her question doesn't cross some line. "Maya said she went to the beach last year and almost drowned, is that..."  
  
"True?" Vincent finishes. "Yeah. I turned my back for one minute and she went running into the water. That part's true. I bet she told you about mermaids too, right?"  
  
"Yeah," Clarke says with a nervous laugh. " _Mermaids_. Totally implausible."

Wells has told her in the past that she's a terrible actor and he's probably very right.  
  
"I can't explain what brought her back to shore," Vincent says with a shrug. "Weird water currents, or sheer dumb luck. I don't know, Clarke. But she likes to believe it was mermaids, and who am I to tell her otherwise?"  
  
"Right," Clarke says. "Well, I'll see you around, Mr. Vie."  
  
With that she escapes outside, her sandals slapping against the surface of the Vie front porch and down onto the sidewalk. Her mind is going a million miles an hour with what Maya told her, and the records she's found of more than one swimmer or surfer being mysteriously pushed towards shore near this beach. Clarke runs into her own house and is dialing Wells' number before she's even kicked off her shoes. He answers as she's bounding up the stairs.  
  
"Wells? You're not going to believe this," Clarke says, closing her bedroom door behind her and plopping onto her bed.  
  
"What, you got your life together and made out with one of the weird feral nudists?" Wells asks, and Clarke smushes her face into a pillow and groans.  
  
"Wells, this is serious. I have a new theory," she says. "Promise you won't laugh."  
  
In quiet, hushed tones, she repeats Maya's conversation, and reads out some of the articles she found online. Wells is silent for a whole minute after Clarke finishes, and she rolls over onto her back and stares up at the stucco ceiling, finding shapes in the tiny white dots.  
  
"Clarke..." Wells says uncertainly. "Are you going to base everything off what a feverish six year old told you?"  
  
"I know how it sounds, but it actually makes a weird amount of sense," Clarke insists, sitting up and kicking her heels over the side of her bed. "It explains why Octavia always goes out into the water to talk with Bellamy instead of you know, meeting up like normal people, and why sometimes she gets weird and stares at the ocean for an hour straight, and why Bellamy smells like fish."  
  
"Maybe he shampoos with essential oils," Wells suggests, and Clarke really wishes she could throw a pillow at his face right now. "What does it say about you that you have a crush on a guy who's half-fish?"  
  
"I'm serious, Wells," she says quietly. "The night I went surfing and almost drowned, I felt something touch my feet right before Bellamy went back into the water, and I swear it felt like scales. And he had these little red cuts on his neck and at first I thought he was hurt, but I think they were gills."  
  
"Fair enough, but how are you going to explain how they walked on land?"  
  
"I don't know," Clarke says, turning her cell on and scrolling through search results again. "I read up on something called a selkie, which normally takes the form of a seal but can appear human if it takes off its fur. Maybe they've got something like that."

"Okay, say they really exist. How come they've never been caught on camera, or there's never been a body washed up on shore?" Wells asks, and Clarke sighs heavily because she doesn't have answers to these questions.  
  
"I don't know," she repeats again. "It's not like I can just go up to Octavia and be like, 'hey, I think you and your brother and all his friends are secretly mythical creatures and I want to ask you questions about your life cycle.'"  
  
Wells starts to say something else, but he's suddenly drowned out by the slam of the front door and high heels clicking down the hallway.  
  
"Clarke!" Abby calls, her voice muffled from downstairs.  
  
"Gotta go Wells," Clarke says breathlessly into the phone. "Mom's home."  
  
She takes the stairs two at a time, finds Abby sitting on the bottom step massaging her ankles. Her heels lie discarded in front of her, and she twists around to smile at Clarke.

"What's up?" Clarke asks, coming to a stop a few steps up.  
  
"I thought we could go out for dinner tonight," Abby says. "Just us two."  
  
Clarke can't deny the spark of interest that runs through her. Kane eats dinner with them most nights, and while Clarke gets along well with him, sometimes she wishes she still had all her mother's attention. So she shrugs and pulls on her sandals while she waits for Abby to change into something more comfortable.

They find a small diner downtown, and it's nothing like what Abby would have picked in Clarke's childhood - it's greasy and deep-fried and the speakers overhead are playing rock hits. It's something Jake would have picked, and Clarke's heart aches. She's not surprised, then, when Abby asks if he's sent any emails recently after they order.

"He's doing good," Clarke says, tracing the rim of her glass of water with one finger. She's trying to do the resonance trick but it doesn't work very well, so she gives up and takes a sip instead. "Hasn't gotten eaten by any lions, at least."  
  
Abby pushes for more details, and Clarke finds herself opening up slowly but surely. She describes the photos, promises to show them later, and a slow, sad smile spreads on Abby's face.

"I miss him too," Abby says quietly, and Clarke clenches her fists under the table.  
  
"Can't miss him that much, you divorced him," Clarke mutters.  
  
"Clarke, honey," Abby pleads, reaching across the table. "Jake and I loved each other as much as we love you. That was never the problem. We just didn't work."  
  
"And you and Kane do?" Clarke says sharply. She doesn't take Abby's outstretched hand.  
  
Abby is silent for a long time, and Clarke wonders if she just crossed a line she shouldn't have. She looks out the window at her side, at a world shaded in the deep blues and purples of dusk. The cars passing down the street have turned on their headlights, and Clarke wishes momentarily she were in one of them instead of sitting in this booth having one of the most difficult conversations of her life.

"We never meant to hurt you, Clarke."  
  
"I know," she mumbles. "But that's what ended up happening."  
  
"It's not the end of our family. I don't want it to be. I want this to work, but I need you to work with me, honey. Please don't push me away anymore," Abby pleads.

And Clarke wants to scream, wants to get her baseball bat and smash through the fragile toothpick bridges she and her mother have managed to build since she came to Walden, because that's what she's been doing for three years. But she's tired, and there are the glimmers of tears in the corners of Abby's eyes and Jake asked her to send his love.  
  
So Clarke reaches over and takes Abby's hand, and it's a promise. Not that everything will be a happily ever after, or that all their transgressions have been forgiven. Just that they will try again.

And that's good enough for Clarke.

She and Abby walk up the driveway at the end of the night with their arms slung over each other's shoulders, giggling like schoolgirls, and something inside Clarke goes 'what the fuck' but there is another part of her, shy and quiet, that says _'finally'_.  
  
The dessert at the restaurant was lame and expensive so they sit down in the kitchen and eat ice cream straight out of the cartoon, licking their spoons and cringing at the cold.

"Hey Clarke?" Abby asks as they're cleaning up. "Are you busy the twelfth? A friend of mine from university is coming into town and I invited her over for dinner. She's a marine biologist looking into genetics, and I know that's not exactly your field, but what would you say to an intern position with her next summer?"

"Woah," Clarke says, blinking rapidly. She never expected to get an offer that promising until her upper years. "Yeah, wow, that would be really cool."  
  
Abby smiles proudly, the corners of her eyes crinkling where wrinkles have appeared, and Clarke ducks her head to hide a smile of her own.

"I knew you'd like the sound of it. Make sure you're free the twelfth so you can meet her."  
  
Clarke isn't sleepy yet when she makes it upstairs, so she takes out the sketchpads that have remained unused since the beginning of the summer and draws broad, sweeping lines and tight waves.

She's working in pencil but she still sees the colours in her mind, black like the sky just before it gets _really_ dark for the hair, golden-brown for Raven's skin, melting into the blues and purples and pinks of Maya's crayons, light reflecting off a thousand shimmering scales. Clarke draws her hair loose, as though floating underwater, framing her face like a halo. The tail is long, coiling, like a whisper, its fins wide and paper-thin.

When she finishes and sets the pencil down she lets out a deep breath she hadn't known she was holding, as though she had really been underwater with Raven the whole time. It's just a rough sketch, definitely not her best work, but it's the first drawing that feels _right_ in a long time, so Clarke takes a moment to stare at it. _Tomorrow_ , she thinks, _I'll draw Bellamy._

Clarke crawls into bed, sets her alarm for her early morning run, and falls into a dreamless sleep.

 

  
........................

 

  
Even if Clarke had any idea how to approach her bosses and be like _'sup, I think your weird feral not-nudist friends are actually mermaids and I would like you to explain how the fuck that works'_ , she doesn't get an opportunity the next day.

The high schoolers have just been set free from their academic toil and they come to Luna Beach in droves to celebrate, so Clarke, Lincoln and Octavia orbit each other in the beach shack like planets narrowly avoiding collision. After closing hours Octavia slams the door shut and crawls onto the counter and claims it as her final resting place, staring up at the thatched roof.

"Clarke, be a good person and break out the rum," she mutters, one hand reaching up to massage her forehead. Clarke grins and ducks into the backroom where the second fridge is. "Lincoln, where the fuck are you."  
  
Clarke hears a crash that is probably Octavia falling off the counter and walks back into the front to find her bosses sitting in the space behind the counter, knees knocking together, heads leaned back against the wall. She joins them, passing off the bottle of rum, and Octavia chuckles throatily.

"To peace and quiet," she murmurs, raising the bottle high and taking the first swig before passing it on. They sit in silence for another few moments, only the sound of their breathing evening out, and Clarke wonders if they can hear her brain making loud distressed noises as she wonders how to casually insert mermaids into conversation.  
  
She never gets a chance to, however, because just then there's a furious pounding on the door.

"We're closed," Octavia yells out, but when the pounding grows more insistent Clarke mumbles and gets up to open it because it's probably just some teenager tearfully backtracking their steps in search of their phone.  
  
She is, then, rightfully stunned by the naked girl with soaking wet hair that all but falls into the beach shack as soon as she opens the door. Clarke very vaguely recognizes her as the other girl who came to the bonfire with Bellamy and Raven and the others.

"Octavia!" the girl gasps out, scrambling to her feet and hunching over, out of breath. Octavia and Lincoln instantly hurry out from behind the counter.

"What are you doing here, Harper?" Octavia asks, grasping the girl by the shoulders. "What's wrong?"  
  
"It's Jasper," Harper says between gasping inhales, close to tears. "Fishing hook to the gut - big one. Others beached two miles down the coast, he keeps fighting and won't let us take it out."  
  
"Jeez," Octavia says, face pale with horror. "Lincoln, we'll need the truck. Clarke, sorry to cut the evening short, you have to go home."  
  
"Are you kidding?" Clarke demands. "Someone's hurt!"  
  
"Go home," Octavia all but snarls, embracing the shivering and crying Harper.  
  
"Do any of you have medical training?" Clarke asks. "You need me. I'm not going anywhere as long as someone's hurt and I can help."  
  
"Octavia," Harper pleads, clutching at the older girl. "There was a lot of blood when I left. Maybe we should bring her."  
  
Just then there's a loud honk from outside the shack, and Octavia looks conflicted. Clarke grabs the first aid kit from behind the counter and makes the decision for her, striding through the door. Lincoln's waiting outside, having driven the truck onto the beach, and Clarke clambers into the bed, knowing they won't all fit in the cab.

Harper and Octavia are right on her heels, though Harper seems rather wary of the truck. As the truck lurches into movement, Octavia digs through the boxes and garbage bags piled in the bed and pulls out a faded yellow sundress that she tosses at Harper. Up close Clarke can see that Harper is young, maybe no more than fifteen or sixteen. She uncertainly turns the sundress over and over in her hands several times before figuring out where the holes are.  
  
"Bellamy's told you dozens of times not to hunt near the fishing boats," Octavia says, staring straight at Harper, her jaw working.

"I know," the young girl says miserably. "But we thought we were being careful."  
  
"Up until Jasper got hooked?" Octavia says sharply, and Clarke lays a warning hand on her shoulder that is immediately shrugged off.  
  
"Yelling at her isn't going to help anything," Clarke says, and Octavia just glances at her from the corner of her eyes, irises as hard and sharp as flint.  
  
"This is my family, Clarke," Octavia says brusquely. The _not yours_ goes unspoken but no less clear.  
  
Clarke leans over the edge of the truck bed rather than look at her, and watches the tires spin and kick up sand behind them, leaving two deep gouges along the length of the beach. The sun has just set and darkness is falling fast, painting the beach in shades of blue and yellow wherever the truck's headlights shine.

"Up ahead," Harper says suddenly, thumping the back of the cab enthusiastically. Lincoln slows, the truck's brakes squeaking in protest, and as Clarke looks over the edge of the bed her heart drops into her stomach. There are figures at the edge of the water lit up by the headlights, two standing guard while a tangle of others thrashes in the shallows.  
  
Octavia leaps out of the bed before the engine's even turned off and hits the ground running. Clarke grips the first aid kit and follows. The truck's headlights cast the scene in sharp contrast, flashes of skin too bright to look at and dark shadows out over the water. There is blood, too, the scent of it heavy and metallic in the air as Clarke runs into the ocean.  
  
"What's she doing here?"  
  
"She's with us, back down Miller," Octavia says, and the boy that moved to block her way reluctantly lets her past. Clarke gives him a curt nod and absolutely does not look down because he's not wearing pants - none of them are.

Jasper must be the boy tangled up in fishing line, brown eyes wide and frightened when they meet Clarke's. He's struggling violently against both the fishing line that's digging thin red lines into his torso, and Bellamy, who's seated behind him trying to hold him still, the muscles in his arms tense as Jasper fights back. The fishing hook itself is buried in Jasper's gut, just under the bottom of his ribcage. Her gaze dips lower of its own accord and _holy fuck that's a tail_.

Jasper's skin melts into scales just above his hips and his torso vanishes into what is unmistakably an orange and white tail that thrashes frantically in the shallows. There is another, darker tail alongside it, dark blue and speckled with tiny white dots like stars, and Clarke sucks in a shaky breath when she realizes it's attached to Bellamy. But there's no time to freak out - not when Jasper's muffled wails of pain still echo up and down the cove.

"Can you get him out of the water?" Clarke demands, immediately opening up the first aid kit and rooting through it with trembling hands for scissors.

"He won't strip," Bellamy says, grunting when Jasper's elbow catches him in the ribs. Clarke has no idea what that means because he's quite naked - they all are - but Octavia kneels on Jasper's other side and clasps his face between two hands.

"Jasper, my friend Clarke can patch you up, but you need to shed your scales so we can take you out of the water, okay?" she says, in the most soothing voice Clarke has ever heard her use. Jasper says nothing, still breathing raggedly in Clarke's ear as she leans over and starts snipping away the fishing line wherever she can, but out of the corner of her eye she sees him dig his hand into the space where flesh forms scales and _tear_. What the fuck.  
  
A moment later Jasper's thrashing tail has shriveled into two perfectly normal human legs, and Miller and Raven descend on either side to pull him up onto shore. Clarke follows, her eyes fixed on what looks like a shimmering curtain clutched tightly in Jasper's hand, formed of the same orange and white scales as his tail. _Just like selkies_ , Clarke thinks dizzyingly. It's one thing to have theories, and it's another thing entirely to see them proved in front of her.  
  
"Okay Jasper," Clarke says, trying for a bright tone as she kneels next to the mermaid _(merman?)_ turned human, coarse sand rubbing against her knees. "I have to take the hook out and it's going to hurt but I promise I'll patch you up real quick and this will all be over."  
  
After disinfecting her hands quickly with wipes she swallows thickly and tries to find the angle at which the hook went in, which is a lot easier once Lincoln brings over a flashlight and shines it down on Jasper's torso. She tells the others to hold him down, takes a deep breath, and eases the hook out, shutting out the sound of Jasper's pained cries. The wound begins to bleed freely once the hook is out, but Harper is already holding out the first aid kit's needle with thread poked through the eye and Clarke murmurs her gratitude before returning to work.

Jasper grows limp and quiet after she's finished bandaging him up, and Clarke leans back on her heels and exhales deeply, suddenly exhausted. From the truck she hears a ringtone that sounds suspiciously like hers, and it's probably Abby calling to see why she hasn't gotten home at the usual time, but Clarke has no energy left to call back.

"Is he going to be okay now?" the Asian boy with sharp cheekbones asks, hovering anxiously over Clarke's shoulder.  
  
"He should be, yeah," Clarke says. "But he can't go back into the water yet."  
  
"For how long?"  
  
"A few days, at least," Clarke says.  
  
Behind her, Bellamy curses, and Clarke's so startled that she whips her head around and then immediately turns it back around because at some point while she was sewing Jasper up, Bellamy acquired legs and _other_ things and she has a rule about people at least taking her out to dinner before pants come off.

"I can't stay out for _a few days_ ," Jasper mumbles, face still pale and drawn. "That's too long."  
  
"You're all welcome at my house," Lincoln says. "I had a saltwater pool installed after Octavia."  
  
"That'll do," Bellamy says after a moment of fierce deliberation while he and his sister exchange grimaces, and Clarke hangs back as they pick up a quietly whimpering Jasper and carry him to the truck. Octavia passes clothing to everyone and they crowd into the truck bed around Jasper, who's sprawled out on the floor, a spare towel under his head as a pillow. Raven settles in next to Clarke and starts wringing salt water out of her hair by the bucket.

"Long time no see, huh?" Raven asks, throwing her hair over her shoulder once the stream of water falling out of it slows to a steady drip. "Thanks for taking care of Jasper here. He's a pain in the ass most of the time but we'd miss him if he died, you know?"

"I'm injured, not deaf, Raven," Jasper says from their feet. His voice is tired and weak, and his eyelashes flutter against his cheeks but he makes no further effort to look at them.

"I don't think a single fish hook would have killed him, even without me," Clarke comments with raised eyebrows.

"He would have complained a lot and then Miller would have killed him for some sleep," Harper quips from the other side of the truck, but she reaches over and pats Jasper on the shoulder to let him know she doesn't really mean it. Miller just glowers from the back of the truck and turns his attention back to the street receding behind them. Clarke suddenly feels very out of place among these people who are obviously very close to each other, and she reaches for her phone as a distraction. She doesn't belong, but Lincoln passed her house and kept driving a long time ago, so she figures she's accepted for the time being.

She was right, it was her mother calling earlier. Clarke quickly texts her a _sleepover at Octavia's house bye!_ and then for good measure, adds a _low battery sorry we'll talk tomorrow_ and turns her phone off so Abby won't call again. Raven eyes the device with half-lidded eyes.

Clarke's never been to Lincoln's house, and it's with some trepidation that she eyes the house whose driveway he pulls into. The building itself is small, set apart from the rest of the neighbourhood, but there's a diligently tended front garden and a path leading around to the back that hints at a large yard. It's down this path that they carry a groaning Jasper into the backyard. Lincoln joins them a moment later with a small float, and Clarke watches as they maneuver Jasper onto the float and carefully lower him into the pool so the bandaged injury remains above water. Jasper, once his legs are in the water, drapes the shimmering fabric of scales over his lower half and it instantly molds to him and reforms the tail that stretches out nearly twice as long as his legs were. Even in the dimness, lit only by lanterns surrounding the pool, the scales have an ethereal look to them. Now that she's no longer distracted by the pressing matter of injuries, Clarke gets a good look at Jasper's tail and realizes the stripes remind her strongly of a clownfish. Somehow, it seems fitting.

Then the others are jumping into the water with him, all of them shedding clothes and draping their own scaled skins over themselves, and -

\- And Clarke doesn't get a chance to see more, because suddenly Bellamy's twisting her around and slamming her up against the wall of Lincoln's house. Clarke's head glances off the brick behind her, and for a moment she sees black spots at the edges of her vision. When it clears she comes face to face with a very different boy than the one she met. Gone is any warmth or playfulness from the bonfire night, and some frightening seriousness in Bellamy's dark eyes tells Clarke that this is the real Bellamy, underneath the mischievousness from the bonfire night.

"Our existence is a secret and I intend to keep it that way. If anyone else finds out about us, you are the first person I'm going to come looking for, and when I find you, I'm going to drag your body so far out to sea no one's ever going to find it, do you understand?" Bellamy all but snarls, his forearm digging into her throat, his hip pressing into hers to keep her pinned against the wall.

Clarke has about zero tolerance for boys slamming her up against walls and threatening bodily damage, even if they are very cute, so she curls her fingers into a tight fist - thumb tucked underneath - and slams it into his face. It hurts her knuckles a lot more than she thought it would, but it does the job. Bellamy stumbles backwards enough that Clarke can slip away and take up an offensive stance.

"I'm not going to tell anyone, Bellamy," she says, her breath coming quickly now that his arm isn't pressed against her windpipe. _Wells doesn't count because he knew before she promised, okay?_ "I figured it out before I saw Jasper, anyway, so you can take your threats and shove them up your ass."

"You did?" Bellamy says, looking more affected by her declaration than by the sore spot on his jaw where he's pressing his hand gingerly.

"A six year old made me watch The Little Mermaid with her," Clarke says with a shrug. Bellamy makes a strangled noise that sounds like it was going to be a laugh before he remembered he's supposed to be pissed and scary.

"Doesn't matter," he says, letting go of his jaw and glowering at her once more. "Either way, you keep your mouth shut."

He stomps off in the direction of the pool, and Clarke huffs in frustration because even as a child, she could never stand letting anyone get the last word.

"By the way your sister taught me how to punch!" she yells at his retreating back, and from the deck, Lincoln gives an approving hum and motions her closer.

"Octavia's upstairs, she's looking for some spare pajamas in your size," Lincoln says.  
  
"Thanks for letting me stay," Clarke says, nodding lightly.  
  
"It's less of a slumber party and more of a kidnapping," Lincoln admits, a note of regret in his voice, and Clarke just shoulder-bumps him and gives him a smile to let him know she doesn't blame him.  
  
Octavia is indeed upstairs, in a room that looks like a hurricane went through it. Clarke figures that has a lot to do with the fact that there's no furniture whatsoever, just a single mattress on the floor and all other belongings strewn haphazardly around it. Clarke made Wells go to an art exhibition with her on their senior trip to New York, and there was a piece that was a lot like this. The difference is, where the artist's mess was intentional, Octavia's simply _is_.

"Try that on," Octavia says without looking at her, throwing an oversized t-shirt at her face. Clarke pulls it on and wriggles her bra off from underneath. She may be in a house full of people prone to fits of blatant nudity, but her own modesty isn't something she can unlearn in just a few hours.  
  
"Well? Are you going to threaten to dispose of my body in the ocean too?" Clarke asks, raising an eyebrow at Octavia's curved back. She receives a quiet snort for her troubles.  
  
"My brother?" Octavia asks.  
  
"Yep."  
  
She sighs deeply and gets to her feet, coming to stand in front of Clarke.

"Look, Clarke," Octavia says. "Our lives aren't a joke. If people find out about us, we're in real, serious danger. So when Bellamy and I promise we'll do anything to keep our people safe, we really mean it."  
  
"And I believe you," Clarke says evenly, staring her right in the eye. "I don't need your threats to do the right thing. Come on, Octavia, we've been working together a whole two months. How many times do I have to prove myself to you?"  
  
Octavia sighs, her shoulders deflating as the breath leaves her. Without her anger, without her furious drive to keep the others safe, she looks smaller, somehow. Clarke steps forward and pulls her into an embrace and they bump together, Octavia's sharp angles and Clarke's softer edges.  
  
"Just once," Octavia says, muffled by Clarke's shoulder. "You're going to have a field time with my brother, though."  
  
"And to think a few days ago I wanted to jump his bones," Clarke says wistfully.  
  
"Ugh, gross," Octavia says, shoving her away and elbowing her in the side. Clarke knows by the wry grin she receives that she's forgiven,  


........................

 

  
Bellamy, Raven and Miller join them the next morning when Clarke's helping Lincoln pile supplies into the truck. The three mermaids - in human form and loose, airy clothing because apparently they can't stand anything tight on the body - are each carrying a large bucket, and Clarke wonders what they're for. Octavia pushes Clarke to sit in the middle of the cab, crammed between her and Lincoln, like she always does when they're driving, and the others find places to sit in the bed amongst crates and surfboards.

Clarke can feel eyes on the back of her head through the window at the back of the cab, and she tries to focus on Octavia instead of letting it unnerve her. Her boss wasted no time in rolling the window down and pressing her face into the wind, letting her hair whip around. Dark strands hit Clarke in the face and she sputters, and that's how she misses most of the drive.

It feels weird showing up to the beach and not being out of breath. Clarke actually misses the usual strain in her muscles and wonders if Lincoln and Octavia will let her go for a quick run before getting down to business.

But as it turns out, business is slow. It's a Thursday, which means the local cinema has a two for the price of one special, and it's also a blisteringly hot day, so most of the usual crowd has retreated to the air-conditioned darkness of movie theaters.

Bellamy and the others set off towards the rocky end of the beach without looking back, buckets swinging from their hands and feet kicking up sand in their wake. Lincoln gets out the rake and methodically scrapes away all signs of their footprints, and they fade into the distance eventually. Octavia scans the beach, hands on her hips, and nods decisively.

"Come on, you've been slacking off on surfing," she tells Clarke, like it wasn't her decision to stop the lessons in the first place. Behind her back, Clarke throws her hands up in the air and tries not to groan aloud, because she actually wants to get back on the water and making Octavia mad might get in the way of that.

She takes it slow at first, because she hasn't had her usual morning run and because it feels like an eternity since she's felt the board ride the waves underneath her. Clarke's still not sure she wants to try standing up, remembering what happened last time, and it's with a wary expression that she eyes the waves up ahead. Octavia says it's a good day for beginners, and Clarke wants to believe her, she does, so she double-checks that her ankle cuff is on and gets on her knees, ready to push up and stand.

Naturally, she topples into the water, over and over again. Panic threatens to bubble up inside of her but Clarke swallows it down and keeps swimming. It's much easier to find her board and break the surface of the water when it's attached to her, and she never stays under for long.

It's after one of these embarrassing dunks that she climbs back onto her board, dripping water, and finds Bellamy watching impassively from a few meters away. Clarke straddles her board, wipes water away from her eyes, and glares at him. He's lost his shirt and she can see the dark curve of his neck sweep into broad shoulders and that's just - that's not fair. Underneath the water, blue scales catch the light and flash at her, and then the water gets too dark.

"What do you want?" Clarke asks tiredly.

"Your ineptitude is painful to watch," Bellamy says. "You splash so much when you fall into the water that I can feel it a mile up the coast."  
  
Clarke snorts, looking down where water laps over the tip of her board. Hot sun beats down on the back of her head.

"So that's how you knew I was drowning, huh?" Clarke asks. "During the storm."  
  
"No," Bellamy says evenly. His shoulders bob with the waves that slowly inch them closer to shore. "I was already watching then. It's not often a pretty girl comes to surf at night."  
  
"After your performance last night, I have to say I thought you'd be more likely to drown me than flirt with me," she admits.  
  
That gets a smirk on Bellamy's face.

"I'm a man of many talents, Clarke Griffin," he says. "You know, there did have to be a reason for all those myths about mermaids seducing sailors into the sea."  
  
"I'm not feeling very seduced," Clarke says, and at that he comes closer, close enough that she can see where his irises glow a lighter brown where the sun hits them, that she could count the constellations of freckles splayed across his cheekbones if she felt so inclined. Bellamy's hands come up onto the edge of surfboard, barely a finger's breadth away from her knee, and she sees translucent webbing between his fingers, yet another detail she missed the night she nearly drowned.

With his hands he braces himself out of the water, not much, just enough that he halves the distance between their heads, far too close for comfort. Even though Clarke forces her gaze to remain on his face, she's painfully aware of water droplets running down his chest, and she makes a mental note to call Wells up later and complain, because _who decided it was a good idea to give mythical sea creatures spectacular abs?_

Clarke stares Bellamy down and refuses to be cowed by his proximity, and something he sees in her eyes must satisfy him because he nods like she's just passed a challenge, and retreats slightly into the water, though his hands remain on the edge of her board.

"Stand up," he orders. "You're going to try again. Feet here and here, stop trying to be cool and keep your arms at your sides. Bend your knees."  
  
The next big wave that comes along knocks her over, of course, but with his pointers she stays upright twice as long as she did last time, and right before she loses her balance she throws her arms up over her head and _whoops_ loudly.

Bellamy vanishes when Octavia calls her back to shore, only a flash of dark blue scales and a whisper of movement against her leg, and then he is gone.

"What's up?" Clarke asks, panting, as she wades out onto the beach, her board dragging in sand behind her.  
  
"Some lady walked into the beach shack a few minutes ago and hasn't come out," Octavia says as she strips out of her wetsuit with practiced ease. Clarke raises her hand to shield her eyes from the sun and gives the beach a quick scan. It's a slow day, sure, but there are enough patrons present that someone walking into the beach shack isn't exactly an unusual event.  
  
"Ooh-kay," Clarke says, drawing the word out long so Octavia knows she's waiting for more explanation.  
  
"People don't come to the beach in black SUVs and lab coats, Clarke," Octavia snaps, and now that she mentions it, Clarke really can see two dark vehicles parked at the crest of the beach, with tinted windows and two men standing like bodyguards at their side. "Something's up."  
  
They burst into the beach shack to find the woman Octavia saw standing ram-rod straight at the counter, tapping a pen against a clipboard she's placed in front of Lincoln. Octavia's boyfriend is stiffly rubbing down a glass as he stares the woman down, his eyebrows furrowed deeply together. The tight press of his lips lets Clarke know he's feeling murderous, but when his gaze flickers to them, his shoulders relax infinitesimally. At Lincoln's relief, the woman in the lab coat turns around and affixes both girls with a scrutinizing look down the length of her nose.  
  
"Who the fuck are you?" Octavia demands.  
  
"You must be Miss Blake," the woman says, giving a soaking-wet, glower-wearing Octavia a smile that doesn't remotely reach her eyes. It's a good thing she doesn't hold her hand out for them to shake, because Clarke doesn't think the tensions in the tiny beach shack permit an action like that. "I'm Dr Tsing, I've been waiting to speak to you." Clarke stiffens when Tsing's attentions pass to her. "And you are?"  
  
"Clarke," she says shortly, not wanting to give away any more. "I work here."

"Yes, I can see," Tsing says with another frozen, stilted smile as she looks over Clarke's wetsuit and salt-crusted hair and sunburned, peeling cheeks. She purses her lips together in displeasure and turns her attention back to the clipboard she's evidently been trying to shove into Lincoln's face. "I understand Mr Woods here has the deed to Luna Beach, and while I understand you two make a steady profit-"  
  
"We're not selling," Lincoln interrupts, still rubbing the same glass down with such intensity that Clarke fears it'll break in his hands. "No amount of money will make me give up my grandmother's beach."  
  
"There are many other private beaches up for sale in the area, nicer than this one," Tsing argues, looking between him and Octavia. "With the money we're offering, you could buy two or three of them."  
  
"So why the interest in ours?" Octavia asks brusquely. She has her hip popped out and her arms crossed and the unimpressed look on her face that Clarke likes to refer to as the 'you are not worthy of my fist in your face' look.  
  
"Well you see," Tsing says, her smile growing increasingly forced with the passage of time. "Luna Beach has a record of scientifically interesting marine sightings, and regular access to this stretch of coast will help my lab immensely in our research."

"You can take your research and suck it," Octavia declares. Tsing's smile slips completely off her face.  
  
"Well," she says haughtily, picking up the clipboard and tossing her hair over her shoulders. "I was hoping for a more _civilized_ discussion, but now I see that won't be possible."  
  
Clarke watches her stomp out of the beach shack with clenched fists. The bang of the door in her wake is too loud, and Clarke feels like she's standing on an edge and the tiniest breeze could blow her over into danger. Not just her: others too. Harper who struggled to put on a sundress and Jasper whose side she sewed up last night. She did promise she wouldn't let anything happen to them.

Something is not right.

Octavia is shaking her head, a muscle jumping in the side of her jaw. Clarke thinks she's seen Bellamy do that too, and the similarities between the two siblings make her blink suddenly for a moment.  
  
"I'm packing up," Octavia says. "I'm going to be on edge for the rest of the day, I need - I need to see the others. Lincoln?"  
  
"I'll call the rentals in," he says, and he lays a hand very briefly on Octavia's shoulder as he slips out from behind the counter and passes them. His eyes meet Clarke's, and his implicit plea is heavy in that brown gaze. _Take care of her._  
  
So Clarke wraps her arms around Octavia, a little stiffly at first because she and Octavia have been tactile as their friendship developed, but not this kind of tactile - they're Octavia's hands on her fists, adjusting her thumb when Clarke forgets to tuck it out of the way, Clarke's arm thrown over her shoulders as they sway with the taste of rum in their mouth, Octavia's goodnatured punch to her shoulder as her surfing slowly improves. They have not been comforting embraces. It is an entirely different feeling.

"You coming home with us?" Octavia asks after they pull away, like nothing's happened.  
  
"I can't," Clarke says. "Promised my mom I'd have dinner with her and a colleague. We're - we're still kind of weird, but she's trying to fix things, so I can't miss this."  
  
"Fair enough," Octavia says, and then Lincoln's returned, so Clarke hangs her wetsuit to dry and slips on her running shoes and jogs home, feeling cool air on her sweat-slicked skin and her ponytail brush against the back of her neck between paces.

Abby is in the kitchen when she arrives, and Clarke is wary of going to her because she's not sure if she'll get a lecture for unexpectedly staying over at Lincoln's last night (she's nineteen, she's in university, she doesn't think her mom has grounds for deciding where she sleeps at night but their fights are not always very logical) but she's thirsty as hell and a long drink of water from the fridge sounds like heaven right now.

"You're a sight for sore eyes," Abby says, eyeing Clarke as she stomps into the kitchen, her chest heaving and her hands fluttering to circulate the air around her.  
  
"Sorry," Clarke says, pouring herself a deliciously refreshing glass of water. 'I'll shower real quick. How much time do I have before your classmate arrives?"  
  
"She'll be here in half an hour, so be quick," Abby says. She's pulling out the nice silverware. Her mother's always been one for flourishes. Clarke downs her glass, feeling cooler already, and turns back to the fridge. She stills for a moment - the drawing she did of Raven is unexpectedly pinned up by a magnet.  
  
"Mom?" Clarke asks uncertainly, reaching out and touching the corner of the paper. The sketch looks different in the daylight, like all sketches do. Clarke considers the broad sweeps of graphite and grudgingly admits to herself that for the first time in months, she doesn't hate how her art turned out. She sees mistakes in Raven's anatomical proportions, of course, but there's still a glimmer of her old passion for art in the curve of her scaled tail and the hair floating behind her in water.  
  
"Should I not have put it up?" Abby asks uncertainly, wiping down silverware. "I'm sorry, Clarke, I saw it on your desk and I thought it looked so nice-"  
  
"No it's okay," Clarke says quickly. She turns away and gives her mother a hesitant smile. "I think it turned out all right."  
  
Abby looks relieved.  
  
"Better than all right," she says, and Clarke is still smiling when she takes the stairs two at a time and all but dives into the shower. Minutes later she hears voices downstairs, but she doesn't come out of the bathroom until she's rinsed as much salt as possible from her hair. She dresses a little nicely than she normally would, remembering Abby's suggestion that this classmate of hers might be able to secure her an internship next summer. This isn't an interview, not by a long shot, but she doesn't want to make a bad impression either.  
  
She hums tunelessly under her breath as she trots downstairs. And then Clarke freezes at the sight of the woman sitting across from Abby.

"There you are, Clarke," Abby says, gesturing to the third seat. "I've been telling Lorelai all about you. Come, introduce yourself."  
  
"We've already met," Tsing says, twisting her mouth into a sugary-sweet smile. Clarke feels like a deer caught in headlights, and her only comfort is the fact that behind the dripping politeness, she knows Tsing was caught off guard by her appearance too.  
  
"Oh?" Abby says, looking back and forth between them. Clarke knows her mother is more than smart enough to pick up on the sudden tension in the room, but she has no way of knowing its reason. "How?"  
  
"Lorelai wants to buy the beach I work at," Clarke says, recovering quickly and sitting down in the third seat at the table. She gives Tsing her own version of a smile, all teeth and no amusement. She can play this game too. "As long as I get to keep my job I don't mind."  
  
A joke to make her mother relax, but also a blatant lie that Tsing won't be able to ignore. She smiles again, stiffly, and picks up her fork.

"Of course Clarke," she says smoothly. "Shall we dig in now, Abigail?"  
  
"Yes, yes," Abby says, quickly jumping on the chance to leave behind the awkward tension of introductions. She and Tsing make conversation over dinner, though Clarke is too on edge to keep track of it. Then Tsing gets up from the table to refill her glass of water, hushing Abby's protests that _she's the guest and should sit down, let me do it!_ and Clarke realizes too late that her drawing of Raven is still pinned up on the fridge.  
  
Tsing pauses in front of it, one hand reaching out to brush the paper. Clarke's shaking, not with the usual frustration when people feel the urge to touch her sketches (seriously, it's not that difficult to resist! Don't touch the sketches! Don't! Shoo, your smudgy hands are not welcome here!) but with something much more dangerous. Tsing gets a thoughtful, calculating look.

"You're a beautiful artist, Clarke," she says, returning to the table with her glass. "It's almost like you've seen the real thing."  
  
"Thank you," Clarke says stiffly, because for the first time in her life she does not know what else to say. Clarke runs headfirst into everything in her life. That's what she does. That's how she is.  
  
She is scared of Tsing, and this time, it's not like she can just take a baseball bat to a car and have it magically fix the growing pit of anxiousness in her stomach. She finishes dinner silently, cutting her food into tiny bits to give herself something to do and eating them one at a time. Tsing departs after promising to meet up with Abby more often, and Clarke gives her goodbyes robotically.

"What was that?" Abby hisses after the front door has closed and Tsing's SUV rumbles out of their driveway.  
  
"Nothing," Clarke says, the picture of wide-eyed innocence. Her nails are digging into her palm. Abby shakes her head, and at the sight of her disappointment Clarke tastes copper in her mouth. She goes upstairs, locks her bedroom door behind her, and sits on the floor behind the bed, where she can't be seen from the doorway. Knees drawn up to her chest, she takes out her phone and looks at her most recent contacts, at Wells and Octavia and her mother, and then she puts it away because less than a day after she promised Bellamy she wouldn't tell anyone, she has already made a terrible mistake.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had so much fun writing Maya's scene you have no idea. Small children confuse and alarm me so I hope I got the mannerisms of a six year old right.  
> I normally don't have a lot of trouble writing Bellamy but he's just, not working in this au. I don't know why. Went back and made the bonfire scene in the last chapter slightly less flirty so hopefully it's less OOC, but the difference between that chapter and this one is still pretty stark, I'm going to blame it on the fact that last chapter he was like 'ooh hot human girl to flirt with' and this chapter he's like 'ALERT THIS HUMAN KNOWS THINGS'. I'm so sorry for pretty much everything.  
> Also! This au gained a plot and probably a chapter or two more than originally planned. It was supposed to be just mermaid fluff, but I got so much support that uh, story structure happened. I want to see more Tsing in stories.  
> Comments are love, comments are life.


	3. In which Clarke is handed a fish tomato, introduces Bellamy to the concept of pizza, and does a little breaking and entering.

At exactly thirty minutes after midnight, Clarke slips out of bed, dresses in cutoff shorts and a comfortable hoodie, wastes an irritating amount of time hunting around her room for her second running shoe with only the light of her phone to guide her, and tiptoes downstairs.

In the darkness, she misjudges the distance from the last step of the staircase to the floor, and swears quietly as a sharp pang of pain rings through her toe.

"Clarke?"  
  
She freezes at the sound of Kane's voice, then sees his silhouette by the window, backlit by the streetlights outside. His hair is mussed by sleep - Clarke refuses to think it might be mussed by something else - and there's a glass of water still halfway raised to his mouth, giving him an entirely unsettled appearance.

"Shh!" she hisses, raising a finger to her lips pointedly. Kane glances upstairs, then back at her.   
  
"Are you sneaking out?" he asks, albeit a little more quietly.   
  
"Are you going to stop me?" Clarke responds, a hint of a challenge in her voice.   
  
"No," Kane says. He pauses to take a sip out of his glass. "Do you want a ride?"  
  
She almost laughs.

"No, it's close by. I'll run."  
  
"Fair enough," Kane says, nodding his head slowly. A car passes down the street and its headlights, blindingly yellow, flash through the window and flood into the living room for a brief moment. Then it's gone, and they're left in the darkness again. "You have house keys, your phone, condoms?"  
  
"Oh my god," Clarke mutters under her breath. " _Yes._ I'm good. I'm fine."  
  
"Just checking," Kane replies, and even in the dim light she can swear he's smirking over the top of his glass.   
  
Clarke shakes her head and slings her canvas bag over her shoulder, wincing when it tugs on her hair. She turns back at the door, looks Kane over one last time.

"You're not bad, you know," she says. "My mom could do a lot worse."  
  
She leaves before he decides to do anything foolish, like cautiously remind her that he doesn't want to encroach on her life, and that if his relationship with Abby ever offends her she should tell him, and he doesn't want to take her dad's place but he does want to support her if that's what she wants. They have that talk about once a week now, and Clarke has started looking forward to it with exasperated fondness. Who knew?

Walden is quiet at night, far enough from the downtown that she passes only the occasional car and late-night dogwalker on her way. She doesn't make it to Lincoln's house before his truck rumbles to a stop on the side of the road next to her, and a truckload of mermaids-temporarily-turned-human holler at her to climb in.

"Fancy seeing you here," Clarke says as she slings her bag over the side and tumbles into the back, promptly landing in Raven's lap.  
  
"Oh, shut up," Raven says affectionately, shoving her off. Her scales are pooled between her feet like a glittering bolt of fabric, moonlight casting silvery reflections on the deep purples and blues. Everyone else sprawled out in the truck bed is positioned similarly, lounging against the sides with their scales draped across the nearest horizontal surface.  
  
"How are you feeling, Jasper?" Clarke asks, looking towards the lanky boy in the back. He smiles broadly, pearly white teeth flashing in the night.

"Going to be better once I'm actually in the water," he says. "The pool's tolerable, but I've been aching to actually be able to stretch out."  
  
"I can imagine," Clarke says. He's made his frustration at his healing wound obvious over the past few days, clearly unhappy that the others could go back to the ocean in rotations to fish and patrol the coast, while he couldn't until Clarke gave her approval.   
  
"Let's hit up the shipwreck by the seaweed forest," Monty suggests, eyes shining with excitement. "We haven't been there in a while."  
  
"Because it's infested with jellyfish," Miller points out, giving the boy at his side a side glance.   
  
"Jellyfish, smellyfish," Harper announces, and this kicks off a vigorous argument about which kinds of fish are actually smellier, which Clarke can't really provide an opinion on because they all smell the same to her.   
  
Bellamy and Octavia are already on the beach when Lincoln pulls the truck up in front of the beach shack, having walked up and down the beach to make sure there was no one lingering to see them. (Apparently they've had problems in the past with teenagers coming to spend a romantic moonlight night on a picnic blanket together, which makes Clarke wince. She already feels like she'll never be able to get out all the sand that's burrowed under her skin.)

"Do I have to do a headcount?" Bellamy mutters as his fellow mermaids clamber out of the truck and immediately start running around the beach. "Seriously?"  
  
"Please do," Clarke says, coming to stand beside him. "It'll make my night."  
  
He glances at her sharply, eyes dark with only the moon and the golden light spilling out of the beach shack to illuminate them. She's still not quite sure what to make of the oldest of the mermaids. Now that she's on the secret, he hasn't reverted to the carefree, flirty boy he was on the bonfire night, but he's been slightly less harsh in his criticisms, mollified that Jasper hasn't died under her careful care.

"Thank you," he says, and Clarke's rather taken by surprise. After a moment, she finds her voice again.   
  
"That's a start," she says. "I'm still mad at you for before."  
  
Bellamy scowls, crosses his arms over his chest.   
  
"And what might be the next step to convincing her highness of my gratitude?"  
  
"Figure it out, Bellamy," Clarke says, sauntering off to talk to Octavia. "You're the charming one, aren't you?"  


 

  
.....................

 

 

 

After a week passes and nothing horrible and life-destroying arises out of Dr Tsing coming over for dinner, Clarke almost wants to relax and consider the crisis averted. Almost.

She is, however, her father's daughter, and thus prone to preparing for the worst. On a slow day at the beach (cinema discounts _again_ ) Clarke packs up early and breaks into a jog through Walden. She doesn't head home, but rather, to the research facility half a kilometer up the coast. Clarke slows to a stop as it comes into view, so she can take it all in.

Honestly, it seems more like a prison than a scientific laboratory, but Clarke can't say for sure what the building was before Tsing bought it. Maybe the barbed wire fences and the guarded gate to the parking lot are left over from the previous owner? She eyes the security doubtfully as she walks up to the kiosk where a very bored man is doing crossword puzzles.

He looks her up and down as she knocks on the window and is apparently unimpressed by her windblown hair and sweaty tshirt.   
  
"Who are you?"  
  
"Um," Clarke says while fluttering her eyelashes, trying to dig deep and find that harmless teenage girl persona she knows must be inside of her _somewhere_. "I'm Clarke? Clarke Griffin? I was just wondering if Dr Tsing is here, she's a family friend-"  
  
"This is a serious workplace, miss," the guard says, scratching out _7 across_ with his pencil. "You can't just walk up and demand a social call."  
  
"I know," Clarke says, smiling broadly. "But Dr Tsing said I could maybe intern here next summer, and that she'd give me a tour around?"   
  
The guard glowers at her some more before picking up a phone and dialing with a long suffering sigh. Clarke hums along tunelessly and pretends not to listen in on the half of a conversation that she can hear. At long last the guard slams the receiver down and waves her through.   
  
"Go inside," he says, without looking at her. "Don't touch anything. Most of the equipment is worth more than you."  
  
When Clarke looks back, he's already returned to his crosswords. She takes a deep breath and slings her bag higher over her shoulder, and then starts up the walk to the facility.

Tsing is waiting for her in the lobby when she arrives, looking surprisingly welcoming considering the way she and Clarke last parted, and the fact that Clarke didn't give her any heads up at all before showing up and demanding to be let in.

"Clarke," Tsing says warmly, extending her hand and putting one hand on her shoulder to lead her away from the receptionist that is craning her neck over her desk to look at them. "I have to say I didn't expect to see you again."  
  
"Well," Clarke begins, fiddling with her bag strap and trying to look appropriately bashful. "I had some time to think about my actions and I think I was really rude and I'd like to give our friendship another chance."  
  
Bullshit. So much bullshit. How good is Tsing's bullshit radar? Clarke hopes it's terrible because she doesn't know how she's going to get away with this otherwise.

"Of course," Tsing says. "Though I should be apologizing as well. I wasn't expecting your colleagues to be so against selling their beach, and I deeply regret how I responded, especially since I should be setting an example. But you didn't come all this way to apologize, did you Clarke?"  
  
"Before we got off on the wrong foot, mom said you might have an internship position open here next summer. I understand if you want to take the offer back," Clarke leads hesitantly. "But if not... I'd really like to look around, if that's all right with you. I never thought I'd be into genetics, but I've been doing some reading over the summer and it's actually really interesting..."  
  
"Come right this way," Tsing says, looking as pleased as the cat that got the canary as she leads Clarke down a long, narrow hallway. It's an analogy that does nothing to stifle the nervousness brewing in Clarke's gut. "Don't worry, I'm not one to hold grudges for bad first impressions. And of course, we need to stick up for each other as ladies in science. Let me show you what started all of this!"  
  
Clarke warily follows Tsing into a laboratory off to the side. She reaches into a freezer and pulls something out, spinning around to show Clarke.

"It's..." Clarke trails off, frowning at Tsing's outstretched hand. "A tomato?"  
  
"My thesis project," Tsing corrects with a prim smile. "Also a tomato, but also something much, much greater than a tomato. The average refrigerator is kept at about 40 degrees Fahrenheit, so just over the freezing point of water. The average freezer is a little colder than that, at about 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Ours is specially designed to go even colder."  
  
Clarke reaches out and pokes the tomato. Her finger leaves a faint imprint on its surface, like when she was young and she'd draw on the frost that formed over Jake's car windows, but the tomato itself looks perfectly unharmed, as red and swollen as it must have been the day it was picked.   
  
"Do you see any frost damage?" Tsing asks, turning it around so Clarke can see all sides.   
  
"No," Clarke murmurs, interested despite herself. "I was just thinking that."  
  
"Your mother did say you were very perceptive," Tsing says wryly. "We inserted antifreeze genes from a variety of cold-water fish, but the winter flounder - Pseudopleuronectes americanus, if you want to get technical - was the most effective one. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite effective enough that anyone was interested in buying a frost-resistant tomato, so it remains a mere scientific oddity," Tsing adds, her gaze lowering sadly.   
  
She turns away from Clarke to replace the tomato, then leans on the freezer door and crosses her arms.

"So this is what we do. We initially started the project intending just to combat world hunger, but there's much, much more we could do, Clarke. The world is your playground. What do you think?"  
  
Clarke gazes around the laboratory, at the thinly-veiled hope and pride on Tsing's face, and struggles to remember exactly why she was so wary of Tsing to begin with.

_The armoured SUVs on the beach_ , she tells herself. _Trying to force Lincoln to sell his beach. That weird look she got in her eyes when she saw the drawing of Raven._

"I'm..." Clarke begins, trailing off as her thoughts pull her in different directions. "Impressed," she says at last, voice faint. Tsing seems pleased with her anyway, all but glowing at the praise.   
  
"I'm afraid it's too late in the summer to offer you an official internship," Tsing says, "And we're still getting set up in this location, anyway. But next summer we'll have everything figured out and you'll be able to help with the fun part. Of course, if you don't want to wait quite that long, I'm sure I could find you a lucky opportunity, if you can convince your friends to sell their beach..."  
  
Clarke swallows hard, is suddenly very glad she has her back to Tsing as she wanders the laboratory.

"I don't think that'll be happening any time soon," she chokes out, and from behind, she hears Tsing sigh heavily.   
  
"Very well," Tsing says. "Oh, look at the time. I'm supposed to meet with a sponsor now, would you mind if I escorted you to the gate, Clarke?"

 

 

  
.....................

 

 

  
Clarke goes home to find Bellamy sitting on her porch, dressed in another pair of Lincoln's boardshorts and a ratty summer camp t-shirt that's actually Clarke's. It's oversized on her, but decently normal-looking on him. It gives her a funny feeling in her stomach as she looks him up and down. He's also barefoot, like always, and his hair is still damp, so she knows he hasn't been waiting for long. His scales are nowhere to be seen.

"What do I owe the pleasure of your company to?" Clarke asks as she steps onto the porch and fishes around her bag for her keys.   
  
"Divine intervention, probably," Bellamy says, getting to his feet and coming to stand very, very close by her. Clarke shoots him a look over her shoulder as she unlocks the door and steps inside. Bellamy gives her a blindingly sunny smile in return and follows her inside without asking, craning his neck to look around. She's learned that's just the way he is.   
  
"No, seriously, what do you want?" Clarke asks.   
  
"To apologize," Bellamy says. He's looking at a painting she did a year or two ago, oil on canvas of a gnarled piece of driftwood on a beach, tiny crabs scuttling around at its base. "Did you do this? It's really good."

"Yes, I did it. Flattery doesn't count as an apology, by the way."  
  
"I know," he responds, his forehead creasing as he frowns at her. "I'm just - I'm not good at this. My whole life, I've been trying to protect my people. Bad things happen when I'm not watching out for them. It's easier to assume everyone is an enemy than to trust the wrong people. When you found out about us, I panicked."  
  
Clarke crosses her arms, leans against the armrest of a nearby couch.   
  
"Okay," she says. "That's an explanation. And it's a good one. But it's not an apology."  
  
Bellamy grinds his teeth audibly, a muscle in his jaw twitching. Finally he comes to stand right in front of her, hands at his sides, eyes staring right into hers.

"I'm sorry," he says, enunciating every syllable so there's no chance she'll misunderstand. "I'm not sorry for not trusting you at first - my people's safety comes first. But I am sorry for hurting you. I'm really sorry, actually. I trust you know, and I'd like to spend more time with you... If you'll let me."  
  
Clarke waits a moment, searching his dark eyes for any trace of resent or doubt, but she finds none. This is yet another layer of Bellamy she hasn't seen before - not the flirty, cheerful boy at the bonfire, not the angry, protective leader, but something deeper and more honest.   
  
"Apology accepted," she says, her throat dry. "And yes, we can... hang out." She clears her throat and stands up before she remembers how close Bellamy's standing. Luckily he takes a step back, giving her room to breathe. "We can start right now. I'm on dinner duty tonight, and I need to go get ingredients from the store. Have you ever had pizza?"  
  
"What's pizza?" Bellamy asks, tilting his head sideways. Clarke is still trying to get a hang of what the mermaids do know about human culture - their knowledge is patchy and unpredictable. Raven, for example, apparently knows how to hotwire a car, and Jasper and Harper can duet both parts of 'Baby It's Cold Outside', but none of them understood what Clarke meant when she said she was heading back to university in the fall, and all of them consider the double-knotted laces on her running shoes nothing short of witchcraft.

"Oh man," Clarke says. "Prepare to have your mind blown."  
  
On the walk to the grocery store, Bellamy tries to pry the secrets of 'this pizza you speak of' out of her, but she doesn't want to spoil it for him, as ridiculous as it sounds, so instead they trade explanations of each other's world. Clarke learns that the mermaids migrate up and down the coast with the seasons, though they try to spend as much time here with Octavia as possible. They tend to stick close to shore, though if they do venture out to deeper seas, they find schools of dolphins or whales to travel with. Bellamy, in turn, learns about Clarke's family.   
  
She doesn't mean to get personal. Generally she sticks to explaining national holidays, or every day life, and once, memorably - Nicki Minaj. But somehow she finds herself explaining Jake's absence and Kane's recent appearance, and how confused she feels about it all.

Bellamy is a good listener. Which is not fair, because she's trying to remember that he's an asshole... except when he's not.

The wide-eyed, wondering person he becomes in the grocery store is a different person entirely from the boy who challenged her in Lincoln's backyard.

"There's so many boxes!" he hisses in Clarke's ear as they walk down an aisle, his bare feet making no sound on the tile. An employee looked at them askance earlier, and Clarke feared they might pull a 'no shoes, no service' rule on them, so she assigned Bellamy to push the cart so he wouldn't go wandering off and cause trouble. "How do you know which box is the right one?"  
  
"Practice, I guess?" Clarke says, her voice going up at the end. She's been questioning a lot of aspects of her life lately. She never consciously considered her ability to buy food before this summer.   
  
"Wow," Bellamy says. They go down the frozen produce aisle next, and Clarke tries not to remember the tomato in Tsing's outstretched hand as she looks at all the saran-wrapped meats. The frozen produce aisle was apparently a bad idea because Bellamy becomes personally offended at the selection of fish - _'It's blasphemy, Clarke. What are they doing to those fish? You can't freeze them. You have to eat them as soon as you catch them or else they lose all their taste. Clarke, why? Do you even have taste buds? You can't do that. Look at those fish. Don't they look sad? How can you stand by and condone this, Clarke?'_  
  
"He's a fisherman," Clarke explains to an old couple who's giving them alarmed looks.   
  
"Damn right I'm a fishman," Bellamy explodes, and she drags him away before someone calls security on him. After a moment of hesitation, she snags a pack of anchovies off the shelves and tosses it into the cart. She's never been fond of them on pizza, but Bellamy might warm to them, eventually.

They sit in front of the oven as the pizza bakes, both of them still covered in tomato paste, and Bellamy tells her about the reefs along the Florida Keys. Clarke closes her eyes and lets the sound of his voice wash over her, imagining warm waters and fish peeking out from between branches of coral, vivid colours and the tug of the current at her ankles - except that then she realizes, with the kind of detached wonder often found in dreams, that she is not imagining herself with legs but with a tail as long and shimmering as any of the ones she's seen so far.

"Where are your scales, by the way?" Clarke asks, frowning when she realizes she hasn't seen them at all today. Most of the mermaids tend to be fiercely protective of their shed skins, always carrying them with them when they venture inland to visit the beach shack or Lincoln's house.   
  
"Hid them under some rocks," Bellamy explains. "There have been people watching the coast, seeing who comes and leaves the beach. Didn't want them to see it, just in case."  
  
"What kind of people?" Clarke asks, dread pooling in her gut.   
  
"I didn't get close," Bellamy says, both his eyes and his voice darkening. "But I've told everyone to be careful about who sees them. We have paths up the cliffs that no one else uses, those aren't monitored because they're not technically supposed to be passable. I used one to come see you today."  
  
"Be careful, Bellamy," Clarke says, and she reaches out without thinking, her fingers brushing the warm freckled skin on the back of his hand and then curling in the spaces between his own fingers. He looks at their joined hands in surprise, then back at her, and Clarke's heart might just stutter.   
  
But then the oven beeps, loud and insistent, to tell them the pizza's done, and Clarke leaps away like she's been burned. Bellamy looks downright alarmed as she throws several cabinets open looking for where Kane hid the oven mitts, and doesn't calm down until she tells them this is normal pizza procedure. The moment they might have had is gone.

_It's okay_ , Clarke reasons with herself, a little more chipper than necessary. _Pizza is usually better than boys._

(Bellamy is not most boys.)

"Oh my god," Bellamy says after they've let it cool and he's had his first bite of a real pizza. "Oh my god."

She can't read his face.

"Are you okay?" Clarke asks, hands fluttering nervously. "Can your system even digest this? Oh no, I didn't think about that. Maybe you're too fish to eat pizza."  
  
A few minutes later Bellamy is bent over the toilet bowl in the tiny downstairs bathroom, while Clarke awkwardly pats his head. She's reminded very vividly of holding her roommate Roma's hair back after drunken escapades, but Bellamy doesn't have enough hair to hold so she tangles her fingers in his dark curls and hopes he finds the gesture somewhat comforting.

"That was delicious," Bellamy says after she's made him rinse his mouth out. He gives her one of his feral smiles, the ones that bare his too-pointy teeth and draw her attention to the glint in his eyes, and Clarke wonders if she's just made the biggest mistake of her life by introducing Bellamy Blake, mermaid extraordinaire, to homemade pizza. "Can I have some more?"  
  
"No," Clarke says sternly. "No more pizza for you. You obviously don't have the right digestive system for it."  
  
He looks so crestfallen that Clarke almost gives in and lets him finish his slice, but just then, the front door swings open and Abby walks in, juggling keys and mail and a stack of unfinished medical reports.

"Did you make dinner?" her mother asks, sniffing the air.   
  
"Yup," Clarke says. "Pizza. Hope you like. This is Bellamy, by the way."  
  
Abby and Bellamy scrutinize each other like two predators in close quarters, and too late, Clarke realizes Bellamy is still wearing her ratty summer camp tshirt. _Oh fuck_ , she thinks. A moment later they both relax infinitesimally, meaning Abby has decided she will question Clarke's life choices at a later date. She drifts over to the pizza on the cutting board, leaning closer to smell it again.

"Clarke, are these anchovies?" Abby asks. Her confusion is justifiable. Clarke has never in her life expressed a liking for anchovies on her pizza.   
  
"I figured I'd mix it up a little," Clarke says with a shrug. "Bellamy likes anchovies."  
  
"Not those anchovies," Bellamy argues. "Those anchovies are a _tragedy_."  
  
"Don't start this again," Clarke warns, and Bellamy's eyes light up like they always do before the two of them burst into a heated debate, so with a quick goodbye towards her mother, Clarke grabs Bellamy's hand and pulls him onto her front porch. After the door shuts behind them, she turns back to him. "My mom thinks we're fucking. Because you're wearing my shirt."  
  
"We could be," Bellamy says agreeably. He pinches the fabric of the tshirt between two fingers and eyes it. "This is yours?"  
  
"You can have it for now," Clarke says. "Just until you get back to the beach. I'm a generous person."  
  
"It would be a travesty if I had to go home shirtless," Bellamy responds, nodding along seriously.

"Oh shut up," Clarke says, punching him in the shoulder, and he gives her another one of his grins over his shoulder as he leaves, the ones that make her stomach twist into butterflies. She doesn't think Bellamy is the kind of person that smiles that much usually, and it makes her feel special to think she's brought out so many. Even if she just poisoned him with pizza.   
  
She's glad he came to apologize.

 

 

.....................

 

  
  
Clarke misses her early morning run the next morning because she and Abby had a movie marathon night and ended up falling asleep on the couch - ergo, no alarms set for the morning - and by the time she arrives at the beach, there is a crowd gathered around the closed sign hung between two posts in the parking lot.

"Hey, you work here, right?" someone asks as they spot her approaching. "Can't you take this down?"

Clarke eyes the sign, which she recognizes as one usually leaning against the wall in the beach shack, buried under a bunch of other stuff, which states that the e-coli levels are too high for swimming today and thus, the beach is closed.

"If the sign's up," she says at last, aware of all the disgruntled beachgoers staring at her. "It must be up for a good reason. I'm sorry guys. I'd go home if I were you."  
  
She hops over the fence and walks across the unraked sand - Lincoln _always_ rakes the sand in the mornings, she's _never_ known him to miss a day - and her dread grows as she takes in the deserted beach, the shack locked up as tight as it is at night. She raps her knuckles against the wood and listens for an answer.

"We're closed!" Octavia's muffled voice answers.   
  
"It's me!" Clarke shouts back. "I can come back later if you and Lincoln are having sex on the counter or something, but can you let me in otherwise?"  
  
Silence, and then the door opens. Clarke sees Octavia's eyes first, swollen and tearful, and doesn't hesitate before opening her arms and letting the other girl fall against her, a mess of pain and distress. As her eyes adjust to the darkness inside the shack, she realizes Lincoln isn't there. Clarke pushes Octavia forward and kicks the door shut behind her. The thud reverberates throughout the entire beach shack, and she's aware for the first time of how fragile and dilapidated the wooden walls seem.

"What's going on?" Clarke asks as Octavia pulls away and wipes away tears with the heel of her palm, putting on a determined look. "Where's Lincoln?"  
  
"He took the boat out," Octavia says, voice wavering only a little. "We need everyone on the search."  
  
"Search? Search for what?" Clarke asks, more and more confused.   
  
"O?" a weak voice calls from the back room of the shack. Clarke looks up as Bellamy appears in the doorway, looking pale and shaky. "Who's - oh. Hey Clarke."  
  
Clarke swears as she takes in the sight of him, still wearing the tshirt he stole from her yesterday. Something terrible has happened in the space of the last several hours - he's trembling as he holds onto the doorframe to keep himself upright, and dark spots bloom on his skin like bruises, especially on his legs. The shadows under his eyes are so pronounced he almost looks like he has two black eyes, and his face has a drawn, haunted look to it.

"The pizza didn't do this, did it?" Clarke asks quietly as Octavia leaps forward to support him. Bellamy laughs weakly as his sister helps him back into a makeshift bed they've made in the backroom out of lifevests and spare sails.   
  
"No, not the pizza," Bellamy says, his eyes closing as he lays down with a groan. "I fucked up, Clarke. I'm Cinderella at the ball and my carriage turned back into a pumpkin."  
  
That doesn't make any sense until she remembers his words from the bonfire night, when he said Octavia was making them go home and Clarke complained that it was only midnight.  
  
"Stop it," Octavia says, her voice as hard and sharp as flint. Bellamy visibly winces and turns his head away from her, appearing to shrink back. Clarke realizes she's been shaking her head in horror this whole time. "If we find it soon you still have a chance."

"This..." she says, having to force the words out. "This is what happens if you don't go back to the water?"

"No," Octavia says grimly. "This is what happens when you lose your scales."

 

  
.....................

 

 

  
The other mermaids drift in and out for the rest of the day to check on Bellamy, but they never stay long before venturing back out into the water to keep searching. From what Clarke gathers of their reports, Bellamy's scales are nowhere to be found, having first been declared missing when he returned after visiting her yesterday only to find the rock shelter where he'd hidden them empty.

Clarke and Octavia take turns carrying a bucket down to the water's edge and hauling it back to splash over Bellamy's shivering, feverish form. He grows progressively worse with each passing hour, his moments of lucidity growing fewer and further between as the sun reaches its apex in the sky and then begins to descend. It's like nothing Clarke's ever seen before in her textbooks - of course, Bellamy isn't even human. The textbooks don't apply.  
  
"We're running out of time," Octavia murmurs as she rests a saltwater-soaked rag on her brother's forehead, the worried furrow between her eyebrows growing permanent.   
  
"How much longer do we have?" Clarke asks. Octavia is silent for a moment, her shoulders tense and defensive.

"I lasted three days," she says quietly. Her expression is as dark as the thunderclouds that sometimes sweep in from the open sea. "He might have less. Once the scales dry up they turn into seafoam and there's no turning them back. That's it."  
  
And all of a sudden, the truth comes crashing down around Clarke, so glaringly obvious she wonders how she missed it for so long. The reason why Octavia doesn't go out into deep waters with the rest of her family, why she takes her surfboard out on the waves to speak to Bellamy at dawn, the longing looks she sends towards the beach before climbing into Lincoln's truck at the end of the day.

Octavia, once upon a time, had her own tail, her own scales and webbed fingers. What remains now is an angry, stranded girl, neither human nor mermaid but something impossibly lonely between.   
  
"They better find his scales," Clarke says at last, and Octavia gets up and stomps out of the shack with an empty bucket. Clarke takes her place next to Bellamy and reaches for his hand, twining their fingers together. His skin is cold and clammy, and she bites her lip in apprehension, hoping against hope that what happened to Octavia won't happen to him.   
  
"Clarke," Bellamy says unexpectedly, his hoarse voice startling her. "You're still here."  
  
"Of course I'm still here," Clarke says, more strained than entirely necessary. Bellamy licks his drying and cracking lips and despite the weakness in the rest of his body his eyes bore into her face, unwavering and unrelentless.

"When Octavia lost her scales, I thought she was going to die," Bellamy croaks.

"But she didn't."

"She's stronger than I am."

"You're not going to die, Bellamy Blake," Clarke says firmly. "Not on my watch. They'll find your scales soon."

"And if they don't?"

"You can't think like that."

"If I run out of time..." Bellamy trails off, his breath hitching. She squeezes his hand tightly between hers as he finds the breath to continue. "Clarke, if I run out, who's going to tell Octavia what's happening underwater? She - she always wants to know what she's missing."

Clarke thinks of all the mornings she's seen his messy mop of hair just over the surface of the water, Octavia's head bent towards him as they speak about topics unknown - mermaid gossip, probably. Tears sting the corners of her eyes and she fights not to cry because this is not her pain, not her family - except that, somewhere along the way, it became hers too.

"You're going to tell her, because you're not fucking running out of time," Clarke says fiercely, her voice thick with all the tears she won't let free because she doesn't want him to see how scared she is. "I won't let it happen."

Just then, Octavia returns, and seeing them, she crawls into the nest of lifevests and sails, her head nestled in the crook of Bellamy's limp arm. She's shaking very, very slightly. Clarke doesn't blame her at all. She says nothing as she dips a sponge in the bucket Octavia just brought back and starts to wring it out over Bellamy's chest. His eyelids flicker closed and under her care he sinks back into an uneasy rest.   
  
What seems like an eternity later she presses the sponge against the bottom of the bucket and realizes it's time to fill it up again. She stands with a groan, handing the sponge to Octavia, and takes the bucket down to the water.  
  
As she lugs it back up the beach, cool water splashing on her legs whenever she stumbles on uneven sand and piles of seashells left by overenthusiastic scavenger children, she happens to glance up, to the crest of the beach.

Someone is standing at the edge of the parking lot, watching her.

Beside them is a black SUV with tinted windows, the same ones that accompanied Tsing when she came to demand that Lincoln sell the beach to her. Clarke sets the bucket down in the sand between her feet and shield her eyes from the sun as she gets a better look.

The man watching her salutes mockingly and gets back in the SUV before driving away. Clarke feels as though she's just spilled the entirety of the bucket of water on herself, feels drenched in freezing cold fear.

The first piece of evidence: Tsing's complete disinterest in buying any one of the other numerous beaches along this stretch of coast. Yesterday Bellamy said there were people watching the beach, watching them. She thinks of the tomato imbued with antifreeze fish genes, of the drawing of Raven pinned up on her fridge that had garnered such thoughtful interest from Tsing, and comes to a very bad, horrible, no good conclusion.

"Octavia," Clarke calls as she strides back into the beach shack. "Do you have the keys to Lincoln's truck?"  
  
"Yes," Octavia says, giving her a suspicious sideways look.  
  
"I think I know who has Bellamy's scales," Clarke says, taking a deep breath. She doesn't miss the flash of surprise over Octavia's face, and then worry as she glances back towards her brother's still form. "Come _on_ , we're not helping him by sitting here and waiting."

"I know," Octavia says quickly, brushing Bellamy's damp hair out of his face one last time. "I just - I don't want him to wake up alone."  
  
"I'm sorry," Clarke says honestly. The thought of leaving is paining her too, but the thought of Bellamy in pain is even worse. "I wouldn't make you come if I didn't need you. I can't do this alone."

Octavia gets up, and Clarke kneels down beside Bellamy. He stirs weakly when loose strands of her hair slip over her shoulder and tickle his cheeks.

"Hey," Clarke says gently. "We'll be right back, okay? You only have to stick it through a little while longer."  
  
Bellamy's eyes are clouded and unfocused, but he turns his head ever so slightly towards her and she hopes he's understood her message nonetheless. On impulse, she kisses his cheek quickly. Octavia, mercifully, says nothing.

They don't speak on the drive there aside from Clarke giving Octavia one-word directions to Tsing's facility, until they reach the last stretch of road along the coast and they're almost there.

"I need you to pretend you're considering a deal with Tsing," Clarke explains. "Don't actually agree to anything or sign any contracts, just act like you _might_ be interested and you want to discuss payment."  
  
"How long do you need?" Octavia asks tersely, her knuckles white on the steering wheel.   
  
"As long as you can get me," Clarke says, and then they fall silent as they pull up to the gate between barbed-wire fences. By some sheer stroke of luck, the guy who was doing crosswords at the gate the first time Clarke came is working today as well, and Clarke just has to put on her business face and explain to him in great detail how they're here to make a deal with Dr Tsing until he gets bored and waves them through.   
  
Octavia looks around the lobby as though she's been thrown into a gladiator pit instead, appraises the receptionist at the desk as though she's a lion. Clarke squeezes her hand once and whispers in her ear.

"You'll be okay."  
  
Octavia nods, once and curtly, and Clarke pulls away.

"I'm going to go to the bathroom," she says loudly, loud enough that the receptionist hears too. Just as she slips down the same hall Tsing led her down last time, she hears Tsing's voice greet Octavia. Her response is lackluster, but Clarke hopes she'll be able to keep up the pretense just long enough for Clarke to find what she needs.   
  
She's astonished that she finds the laboratory Tsing led her to last time on the first try. Glancing both ways up the deserted corridor, Clarke ducks inside and makes her way to the freezer. Cold air washes over her as she pulls on the doors with both hands, and she shivers at the mist that settles over her skin. There are shelves upon shelves of Tsing's genetically modified fish tomatoes - and then, shoved into the back corner, an unmarked box.

Clarke pulls it out with trembling hands, both from the cold and from fear that she'll be caught. She lifts up the lid, and almost cries when she sees the shimmering stretch of dark blue scales, speckled with white and pale yellow like tiny glittering stars. The evidence of deterioration is visible, though - the colours are not as vivid as they were on Bellamy's body, and a thin layer of dust comes off on her fingers when she strokes it, like the wings of a moth. She pulls it out as quickly as she can, while still being gentle - it's the first time she's touched anyone's scales, as the other mermaids tend to be fiercely protective of them, and it's not like she can blame them for it now that she's seen what happens when they're lost - and hides it at the bottom of her canvas bag. She puts the box back where it was as though nothing happened, and then flees the laboratory.   
  
She breathes a sigh of relief when she makes it back to the reception area without anyone sounding any alarms, and apologizes to the receptionist for taking so long.   
  
"It's that time of month, you know," Clarke lies, playing on her sympathies. "I have horrible cramps."  
  
"I know," the receptionist says. She holds out a bowl to Clarke. "Have a mint? It'll cut down on nausea."  
  
Clarke rolls the mint around in her mouth as she follows the receptionist to Tsing's office. Octavia turns to face them when the door opens, and she looks positively murderous. Tsing has her usual strained, cool smile plastered over her lips.

"You know what," Octavia says, her eyes staring into Clarke's. There's no way she can ask if Clarke found Bellamy's scales here, not with the enemy listening, but Clarke can see the desperate desire to know in her gaze. "I think I'm done here. I don't like your dumb deal. This is mine and Lincoln's beach and we're the ones who know how to take care of it."  
  
She leaps up from her chair and pushes past Clarke and the receptionist before anyone can say anything else. Clarke gives Tsing an apologetic smile.

"Sorry," she says. "I really did try to convince her."  
  
Tsing's eyes only narrow in suspicion at her, and Clarke gets the feeling that if she sticks around much longer, someone will start to suspect Octavia's negotiation was just a ruse. So she ducks out of the office and runs after Octavia, who's currently power-walking through the facility doors. Outside, they're hit with a wave of summer heat, no longer under the protection of air conditioning.

"Did you find it?" Octavia murmurs, staring straight ahead at Lincoln's truck as she walks.   
  
"Yes," Clarke says, hardly daring to say it above a breath in case Tsing has cameras and microphones everywhere. She wouldn't be entirely surprised. What kind of science lab has barbed wire fences? Octavia's face darkens, and she looks like some kind of avenging Valkyrie, ready to paint her cheeks with the blood of evil geneticists and wear their skulls as a necklace.   
  
"I'm going to make them pay for that," Octavia swears as they climb into the truck on opposite sides of the cab.   
  
"Later," Clarke promises. "Bellamy first."  
  
Clarke clutches tightly at her bag as Octavia all but runs over the gate to the parking lot that the guard only narrowly manages to open before she floors the acceleration. Only once they're back on the long stretch of street speeding away from the lab, does she open up the flap and pull out Bellamy's scales, feeling the cool smooth sheen against her fingertips. Octavia glances over and practically wails.   
  
"Clarke!" she says, voice both stern and horrified. "That is _obscene_."  
  
"What?" Clarke asks, completely bewildered. The truck swerves dangerously on the road as Octavia keeps looking over at the scales in her hand with wide eyes and reddening cheeks. "Watch the road!"  
  
"Stop touching my brother!" Octavia shrieks. "I know you guys have some sort of weird rivalry boner going on but _come on_ , you're going to do that right in front of me?"  
  
Clarke lets go of the scales like she's been burned, watches them pool at the bottom of her bag. Suddenly, she thinks she knows exactly why the other mermaids haven't allowed her to touch their scales.

"Oh my god," Clarke says. "That's a lover thing, isn't it? Touching scales? Oh my god. I just groped Bellamy."  
  
"I forgive you," Octavia says, voice strained. "Look back, is anyone following us?"  
  
"Rearview mirrors exist," Clarke mutters as she twists around in the passenger seat and peers out the window at the back of the cab. The winding coastal road behind them is completely empty of other travellers. "No, we're good. Are you expecting them to follow us?"  
  
"I don't know!" Octavia snaps. "I've never broken and entered before."  
  
"What makes you think I have?" Clarke mutters. Before this summer, her delinquent tendencies were limited to underage drinking and the occasional loud music warning from campus police. If someone had told her that in the span of two months she'd smash a car to pieces with a baseball bat, sneak out at night to provide medical attention to mythical creatures, and break into some sort of evil scientist lair, she'd have laughed in their faces.   
  
"Ugh!" Octavia says, swerving on the street once more. Clarke's truly afraid of her driving, but says nothing. She thinks once more of the condition they left Bellamy in, and hopes they're not too late. Just in case, she peeks at the scales in her bag again, taking care not to touch them. They haven't collapsed into a pile of seafoam, so she figures there's still time to save him.

Clarke doesn't even wait for Octavia to turn the truck's engine off before she leaps out of the cab and sprints down the beach to the shack. Inside, she finds Miller bent over Bellamy, splashing saltwater over his too-warm skin as Octavia and Clarke were doing earlier.

"Where the hell were you?" Miller demands, standing up when he sees her in the doorway. "You were supposed to watch over him!"  
  
"We found his scales," Clarke responds breathlessly, opening her bag to show him the shimmering navy blue at the bottom. Miller's eyes widen almost comically, and then he bends down and heaves Bellamy to his feet, grunting under the weight of his unresponsive body. Bellamy's eyes flicker open as Miller stumbles forward, and they focus on Clarke for a brief second before sliding sideways, too weak to keep eye contact. Octavia appears at his other side a moment later, and together they manhandle Bellamy to the water's edge.  
  
Clarke glances back once, but this time, no one's watching from the parking lot. The beach is deserted but for their own presence, and Miller doesn't hesitate before plunging in waist deep with Bellamy's head lolling on his shoulder. Clarke follows, ignoring the sting of cold water against her legs, and pushes Bellamy's hand into her bag. His eyes fly open as soon as he comes into contact with his scales, and he doesn't look any less sick, but it's like someone's injected adrenaline straight into his heart, giving him feverish energy where he had none.

In the blink of an eye he wraps his scales around himself and then falls into the water, a long, winding tail replacing legs. Clarke feels scales brush against her ankles, and sees his sinewy body just below the surface of the water. And then he is gone, without a backwards glance, and Clarke tries not to hold it against him.

"I'll go after him," Miller says.

Clarke hardly hears. She stands waist-deep in the water, shivering, and scans the waves ahead of her, but no dark, curly head surfaces. She's still standing there while Miller runs back to the beach shack and returns with his own skin, not scales like the rest of them but smooth and gray like a shark, and he gives Clarke a curt nod before fins burst out of his back and he falls into the water like Bellamy did.   
  
And then only she and Octavia are left, the girls with no scales. On the horizon, the sun is setting, painting the ocean with reds and oranges. But there's no warmth in the waves that lap at her skin, only cold, and the fear of what will happen now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fish tomato is a real thing, it's great, I couldn't miss an opportunity to nerd out and include it.   
> No pizza for Bellamy. Just fish. So much fish.   
> Here is my lame attempt at a plot. I have no idea what I'm doing.  
> Thank you so much for all the support you've given this story. I might not reply to comments immediately, because my romantic life has just taken a terrible turn and I'm coping by camping out in the wilderness for a few days and drinking sketchy homemade cherry liquor, but they will probably cheer me up a lot when I get back.   
> One more action-packed chapter (there will also be kissing) and then a ridiculous fluffy prologue in which Wells and some other familiar faces show up.


	4. In which Clarke makes out with a mermaid (several times), steals Kane's nice vintage car (part 2 of vehicle shenanigans) and almost gets arrested for arson (hey, why not.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Clarke makes out with a mermaid (several times), steals Kane's nice vintage car (part 2 of vehicle shenanigans) and almost gets arrested for arson (hey, why not.)
> 
> Listened to Fire Meet Gasoline for a good portion of this chapter, because I think I'm hilarious. You'll see why it's relevant about 7500 words in.

  
Clarke calls Wells in the airport, sitting on an uncomfortable faux-leather chair whose metal armrests are cold against her bare arms. The bruises around her wrists stand out on pale skin in stark contrast, blue-purple having given way to a gross green-yellow in the three days since 'the incident', as Abby refers to it. The exhaustion that weighs on her shoulders and eyelids is oddly reminiscent of exam season.

She rubs at her temples with her free hand as the phone rings in her ear, then glances out the window to her side, where the plane she's about to be boarding has just pulled in. Wells finally answers on the eighth ring, not that she was counting. Clarke thinks of the last glimpse she got of Octavia, of her frightened face behind a window, gone all too soon. And then she resolutely does not think about her - about any of them.

There will be time for that later.

"Clarke?" Wells says. "Where are you? Your end is awfully loud."  
  
"Hey, Wells," Clarke says hoarsely. "Believe it or not, I'm in an airport. Already went through security and everything, so there's no backing out now."  
  
"Please don't tell me Kane's latest attempt to win your approval is to send you on some kind of fancy vacation somewhere warm," Wells teases, and Clarke feels lighter with his familiar voice in her ear, feels her tired cheeks twitch into a smile. "Come on Clarke, you promised we'd see the world together."  
  
"We will," Clarke says fondly, remembering all the maps posted on the walls of Wells' childhood bedroom, remembers the howl of dismay Thelonious had given when he'd noticed all the pins they'd stabbed through major landmarks into the drywall behind. "Incidentally, I am headed to somewhere warm. You. I'm coming home to Ark."  
  
"What?" Wells yelps. "I thought you liked Walden now that you made friends with... You know, _them_."

Clarke sighs as the speakers overhead call for first class passengers and people with young children to line up for boarding. She'll tell him the whole story once she's landed. It'll be easier on her phone bill, too, and at least she'll have the plane ride to think about the order she wants to put her words in.

"I don't have time to explain now," Clarke says. "I'm boarding in a minute. Just wanted to know if you can pick me up from the airport. You're not out on the boat, are you?"  
  
"Just got back from a weekend out on the water," Wells says. "Yeah, I'll be there. Just..."  
  
Clarke hums tiredly in response, hoping he'll get the hint and finish his sentence.

"Are you okay, Clarke?"  
  
She thinks about it for a while, looking down at the bruises on her arms. There are others under her shirt, where the steering wheel slammed into her chest, a soreness in her entire body that she didn't notice until afterwards, after they'd all hugged her goodbye and vanished into the ocean, and she was left standing alone on the beach. Those will heal with time, she's sure.

"I could be worse," Clarke says, the corners of her lips twitching into a smile. It's not the end of the story, after all. "Oh, Wells. You'll never believe me when I tell you how I almost got arrested for arson."  
  
The replying cry of surprise on the other end of the call makes her chuckle.

"You can't say that and not explain!"  
  
"Too bad, time to board," Clarke says, and she stands up with a wince and wraps her free hand around her suitcase. It's small, filled only with the necessities. Abby's promised to send the rest of her stuff down by mail. Her exile was very swift. She and Wells quickly exchange goodbyes and then Clarke's stepping on a plane that'll take her far, far away from Walden.  
  
She gets a window seat - thank you, belligerent mother - and twists around to look out of it as the plane takes off. Once they're high enough, the ocean appears underneath, sunlight sparkling off the waves and making her blink away bright spots. From above the water is cold and blue and impenetrable, yielding none of the secrets it keeps under its surface. With the drone of the airplane's engines in her ears, the days she spent on the beach or on her surfboard feel far away. Clarke can almost believe she dreamed up the entire summer.

Then she puts her hands in her pockets to pull out her headphones, and feels something cool and sharp brush her fingertips instead. She stares at the seashell for a moment, turning it over in her hands. It's smooth to the touch, polished by years of rhythmic waves, and the warm colours are a little faded now that it's dried. Clarke knows a layer of lacquer will bring them out again, but she doesn't think she'll have the heart to bury the shell under a coat of chemicals. She puts it back in her pocket with a smile, and glances out the porthole window again.

The ocean looks very vast below her, an unending void of blue broken up only by wispy clouds. But Clarke knows, better than most people, that those waters are far from empty. Somewhere underneath the surface, there are shadows swimming south, their scales glinting with the sunlight that filters through the waves, their eyes bright and playful.

She wishes them safe passage.

 

 

 

.....................

 

 

 

Two weeks before Clarke boards a plane to never again return to Walden, she quietly takes Maya by the hand at Vincent's request, and sings along to tuneless hopscotch songs as they leap over the cracks in the sidewalks and stop to poke at a very lazy and unimpressed toad sitting in the shadow of a fire hydrant.

Maya's enthusiasm is infectious, and Clarke feels some of the worry she's held in the last few days melt away. In the face of a little girl's laughter, it's hard to remember that bad people lurk at Walden's edges. She wishes villains had remained in Maya's ever-growing collection of Disney movies.

"Can I ring the doorbell?" Maya asks as Clarke leads her up Lincoln's driveway. Her brown eyes are sharp and determined to get their way.  
  
"Yeah, why not."  
  
Clarke was planning on bypassing the front door entirely and going straight into the backyard, like she's done every time she's visited, but far be it from her to deny Maya life's simple pleasures. Maya stands on her tiptoes to reach the doorbell, and rings it three times before Clarke decides there's probably no one inside the house to hear them. They troop around the house to the back gate, and Maya remains dejected until she sees the pool - specifically, the people lounging in the pool.

"Mermaid princess!" Maya shrieks, tearing her hand out of Clarke's grasp and running forward. It's a good thing Raven moves as fast as she does to catch the girl as she leaps off the edge of the pool, before she plunges all the way into the water.  
  
"Woah there," Raven says, setting her back on the edge of the pool. "Aren't you gonna take your shoes off first?"  
  
Maya promptly kicks off her flip flops and one of them hits Lincoln in the head. Clarke tries not to smile at the expression on his face.

"You saved my life!" Maya declares, grabbing at Raven's dark dripping hair as though to make sure she's real and not another crayon drawing.  
  
"Yeah, I remember that," Raven says after a moment, blinking slowly. She turns her gaze on Clarke after a moment, raises one perfect eyebrow. Clarke doesn't even understand how it's so perfect. She's a fucking mermaid, there's no way she has tweezers under the sea. Unless Disney's portrayal of Ariel's hoarding habits were more accurate than anyone could have predicted. Clarke shrugs at her unspoken question.  
  
"If I'm babysitting anyway, I may as well have everyone in one place," she explains, slipping off her running shoes and settling on the edge of the pool next to Maya, her feet dangling in cool saltwater.  
  
"You are not _babysitting_ us," Raven hisses, looking aghast at the suggestion.  
  
"Clarke's the best babysitter though," Maya says, and really, there's no arguing with a little kid. Clarke grins as Maya and Raven drift off, the six year old looking as happy as a clam to finally meet her mermaid saviour again.

"I have to say," Clarke comments to Monty, watching the two of them interact. "I didn't expect her to be so good with kids."  
  
"Of course she is," Monty answers, looking a little surprised that Clarke would think that at all. "We all are. Mermaid clans raise their children communally."  
  
"Really?"  
  
Sometimes it'll strike Clarke how little she really knows about their life. This is one of those times. At the openly curious look on her face, Monty seems to realize she wants him to elaborate, and drifts closer, bracing his arms against the edge of the pool. None of the mermaids are incredibly happy about being contained in a backyard pool rather than the open ocean they're used to, but it's a sacrifice they're making until Bellamy and Miller return.

"Parents take turns watching over the children while the others head off to fish or find interesting things to look at," Monty shrugs. "There's not much more to it. Our lives are pretty chill, at least if we stay away from orca migrations. Orcas are _dicks_."  
  
"Of course there's more to it," Clarke insists. "How big are clans usually? How are they structured? You must not be territorial if you migrate, so where do you sleep?"  
  
"That is a lot of questions."  
  
"Come _on_ ," Clarke whines. "It's not like you have anything better to do with your time right now."  
  
"Fair enough," Monty says, looking thoughtful. "Okay, I'll bite. Clans are usually between twenty or thirty, though there was apparently one with a hundred off the coast of Washington a while back. They all got eaten, it was messy. I told you orcas are dicks. You've met our entire clan, since we didn't split from our parents until about... two years ago."  
  
"What happened two years ago?"  
  
At this, Monty seems to look a little guilty, and Clarke opens her mouth to backtrack if she's stumbled on a sensitive topic, but he merely raises a webbed hand to stop her before finding the right words to say.

"Two years ago... Octavia lost her scales. It was an accident, and it could have been easily prevented, and it made a lot of people mad. Our clan leaders wanted to cut her out entirely. They said there was no place in the clan for a half-human girl. Bellamy didn't take that well, of course. Siblings are pretty rare for us, and they grew up really close. He wasn't going to give her up that easily. So he struck out on his own, and, well, we followed. We head down South when it gets really cold, but we stick around Walden when we can, and that's gotten us into a little bit of trouble with the other mermaid clans."  
  
"Damn," Clarke says, exhaling heavily. "That's... That's awful. Poor Octavia. If you guys all help to raise each other's children... That means your clan leaders basically exiled one of their own kids."  
  
"Basically," Monty says ruefully. "Life under the sea can be tough."  
  
"I'm glad you guys stayed with her," Clarke decides. "I'm really glad. You're good people."  
  
"She's family," Monty responds, but his cheeks are a little pink nonetheless.  
  
Clarke remembers that moment later, when the world crashes and burns around her, and thinks she should have known the lengths her friends would go to for each other. Miller returns the next day, slips into the pool in a flash of sleek gray skin like sandpaper, and hugs Monty like he's been gone for years rather than days. Then he turns to the rest of them, all holding their breath as they wait for news of Bellamy, and they don't relax until he gives a curt nod.

"Is he coming back soon?" Octavia asks from her spot on the side of the pool. She kicks lightly at the water and scowls.  
  
"In another day or two," Miller grunts, one of his arms still slung around Monty's pale shoulders. Then, more grudgingly, he adds, "He's trying to reason with Anya's clan. If the doctors are hunting for mermaid scales, we're all in danger."  
  
Octavia snorts, and it's not a pretty sound, because that's not the kind of person she is. The anger on her face isn't pretty either - breathtaking for entirely different reasons - but Clarke's heart hurts for her all the same.

"They won't agree to an alliance," Octavia says grimly, and then she stands, kicking water off her ankles, and storms into Lincoln's house without a backwards glance.  
  
"She's right," Raven says, eyes distant. Her lips press into a thin, uneasy line as she glances to Clarke. "It's up to us."  


 

.....................

  
  
  
  
Clarke goes surfing late next evening, if only because she sleeps easier when she's exhausted, and there's something relaxing about the motion of the waves. Wells' dad used to joke that they'd been born for the water, both of them, swimming like fish from the time they were toddlers and never once getting seasick as they learned their way around the Jaha's sailboat. If only he'd known.

She's still really terrible at surfing, and never manages to stand up longer than a single minute, but somehow the shortcoming only makes her work harder, even when Octavia and Lincoln can't come out on the waves with her.

That's how she ends up alone on the water when the sun starts going down.

Clarke straddles her board and exhales as she takes a moment to rest and watch the sky. This close to the horizon, the sun feels larger than usual, bright orange and heavy with the ending of its time. Its reflection in the ocean is far longer than it and wavering with the movement of distant waves. Looking directly at the sun leaves funny spots on Clarke's vision so she turns her attention to the clouds instead - light and feathery, the kind she'd use the flat of her pencil to shade in, so as to not leave clear edges. A pencil wouldn't capture the colours, though. Maybe watercolours. She hopes her art block passes soon.

"It's a pretty day."  
  
She jumps a little when the voice comes from behind. Clarke twists around on her board and sees Bellamy float a few feet away, only his head and the brush of his shoulders visible. He's looking at her, not the sky, and his face is distant and unreadable. A coil of worry that Clarke didn't know she was holding in her stomach unravels as she looks him over and he appears to be fine - no injuries, and the shadows that lurked on his skin as he wasted away without his scales have faded.

Clarke swallows down the lump in her throat.  
  
"Yeah," she says, and then coughs a little so her voice doesn't come out so strangled. It shouldn't be so difficult to talk - this is _Bellamy_. They've spent half the summer ribbing each other. "Long time no see."  
  
"Oh there was plenty of sea," Bellamy says, straight-faced, and Clarke stares at him open-mouthed for a moment before her brain realizes what he means.  
  
"Did you - you just - _Bellamy_ ," she says, and something in his face relaxes when she laughs. He swims closer, close enough that she can see that all the freckles on his face have darkened, like he's spent his vacation days entirely in summer. "Where have you been?"  
  
"I swam down to Hawaii," he says, looking a little bashful. "I needed some time to recover. Seemed like a good place to do it."  
  
"You're... okay now?" Clarke asks, searching his face. He's drifted closer this entire time, now near enough that she could lean out and touch his head if she wanted to. She doesn't, just in case he flees again. Instead of answering, he reaches forward and rests a webbed hand on the curve of her surfboard, and then the other. Beneath the water, she catches a glimpse of the sheen of his tail as he curls it underneath them, relying on the buoyancy of her board to keep him up instead.

"I'm okay," Bellamy says, and then he pushes himself up against her board, his chest halfway out of the water, and Clarke bends to meet him in the middle, cupping his face with her hands. His lips are cold against hers, which is kind of weird, and the salt she tastes reminds her a little bit of the time Roma drunkenly made out with her after a frat party and then started crying because she was having a sexuality crises, but then Bellamy's mouth parts and the kiss deepens, and Clarke very quickly forgets about Roma.  
  
She could get used to mermaid-y kisses, she thinks, if it were Bellamy giving them.

They part a moment later to breathe, but he makes no move to slip back into the water, so Clarke rests her forehead against his and tries hard not to grin. She fails.

"I like it when you smile," Bellamy says.  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"Yeah," he says, and then he kisses her again. It really should not be a good kiss - the position's terrible, Clarke's neck is starting to ache, and his shoulders are cold and slippery under her palms, but somehow her brain still pulls up its mental tally of Kisses Clarke Griffin Has Experienced and goes _yeah, okay, let's put Bellamy the belligerent fishman at the top of the list._  
  
Clarke could probably sit on her board and make out with him for the rest of the night, but when the sun finally vanishes underneath the horizon they remember they have responsibilities and swim to shore. Well, Bellamy swims, and drags her board along, while Clarke clutches on and yells _'whee'_ like she's on a roller coaster until a wave catches her in the face and she starts sputtering.

Bellamy refuses to confirm if he deliberately plunged her into the wave or not. Clarke is surprised to find that she does not really care either way.

They show up at Lincoln's house soaking wet, Clarke still wringing saltwater out of her messy braid, and Bellamy is promptly jumped on by every member of his tiny dysfunctional clan. Clarke stretches out on a lounge chair and smiles and thinks nothing could be more perfect.

 

 

..................... 

 

 

  
"The beach closing is awfully odd," Abby comments at dinner, twirling spaghetti around her fork rather absentmindedly. "Do you know when you're going to open it up again, Clarke?"  
  
She gives a noncommittal hum in response, preferring to shove a meatball into her mouth as an excuse not to answer.  
  
"I guess either way I won't be seeing you around the house," Abby says with a sigh. "It seems like you're always out and about nowadays. I suppose I can't complain that you're being social but..."

"That's exactly what you're doing," Clarke points out, half itching for a fight and half hoping she and Abby aren't about to go back down the road they traveled in tumultuous months after the divorce.  
  
"Yes, sorry," Abby says quickly, staring down at her plate. Clarke's about ninety percent certain Kane's been talking to her recently. One time Clarke helped him carry groceries from the car to the kitchen and there was a stack of parenting books in the passenger seat. She's really not sure how she feels about that. "You seem happier now than the beginning of the summer, and I can't fault your friends for that. Especially that... _Bellamy_ boy."

Clarke's responding laugh is interrupted by the mouthful of spaghetti she promptly chokes on, and Abby's already out of her seat and moving behind her to perform the Heimlich maneuver before Clarke manages to clear her airway and waves her mother away.

"I'm fine, I'm fine," she says. "You just caught me by surprise. It's been a while since we... You know. Had rom-com style mother-daughter talks."  
  
"Should I bust out the nail polish?" Abby asks as she sits, shooting Clarke a teasing smirk. It's not a look she wears often, though Clarke almost wishes she did. "You know the hospital doesn't let me do anything fancy with my nails."  
  
"I wouldn't either," Clarke mutters. "Don't want nail polish flecks to come off on my organs while someone's operating on me."  
  
"You're avoiding the subject."  
  
"How? You're the one who brought up nail polish!"  
  
" _Clarke_. Tell me about Bellamy."  
  
Clarke groans and dodges her way through the rest of dinner, and washing the dishes, and then she and Abby curl up on the living room couch and really do paint each other's nails, and she tells her mother a very edited version of her exciting summer romance. She leaves out the kind of details Abby would latch onto and worry about, like the fact that Lincoln's the only one of her new friends who has a social security number, or that she broke into a high-tech scientific laboratory last week, or that Bellamy occasionally has a _fishtail_ , and not the braid kind. Yeah, she really doesn't want to explain that.

But all in all, it's a pretty good night. After they bid each other good night Clarke takes the stairs two at a time and gets ready for bed and slips under the covers, and just as her head's found the perfect position on her pillow, something clatters against her window.

 _I hate squirrels_ , Clarke thinks savagely, staring at her curtain as though mere rage could make the disturbance go away, but a moment later, another projectile pings off her window, and this one sounded heavier.

Cursing, she gets up and yanks the curtain aside, just in time to see an entire handful of pebbles shower against the other side of the glass.

"Holy shit," Clarke says, then glances over her shoulder quickly to see if she's brought Abby running with her swearing. When no overbearing mother shows up in her doorway, Clarke opens up her window and looks down to find... "Bellamy."

“Clarke,” Bellamy says in response, looking unfairly pleased with himself. He’s standing in the middle of Abby’s flowerbeds, stems bent underneath his feet, wearing no shoes as usual, since he’s still spends an absurd amount of time pretending to be personally offended by clothes and human anatomy in general. “I did research on human courting, Octavia gave me documentaries. I think I’m supposed to be holding up a radio too, but I couldn’t find one on this short a notice. Are my pebbles acceptable?”  
  
"Oh my god," Clarke says, pressing a hand to her mouth to keep from laughing aloud. "Yes, your pebbles are okay."  
  
"Just okay?" Bellamy asks, his voice very serious. "You deserve better than okay. Why are you laughing?"  
  
"Bellamy," Clarke says, leaning over her windowsill. "People haven't done this for... I don't know, twenty years?" When his face falls in disappointment, she's quick to add, "But I actually really like it. I'm all for bringing pebbles and boomboxes back into style."  
  
He grins at her, teeth sharp and white even in the darkness, and Clarke unconsciously bites her own lip, feeling her heart go a little funny when he looks at her like that.  
  
"Can I come up?" he asks.  
  
"Hell yes," Clarke says, and sets about telling him how to shimmy up the drainpipe. She could just go down and unlock the front door, of course, Abby's probably asleep by now, but Bellamy seems to be determined to do this the 80's rom-com style and, well, who is she to deny him? He tumbles through her window, a tangle of golden-brown limbs tinged blue by the night, and brings with him the smell of salt and sea and something uniquely _Bellamy_ , something that makes her want to step close and breathe him in.

Instead, she takes a step backwards and sits on the very edge of her bed as Bellamy prowls about her bedroom, looking fascinated with everything. She really hopes he's not going to go down to the kitchen and start combing his hair with a fork or anything, that would be pushing the cross-culture confusion a little far.  
  
"Where are your scales now?" Clarke asks, having been a little paranoid since the incident with Tsing.  
  
"Octavia has them," Bellamy says absently. "They'll be safe at Lincoln's."  
  
"Good, that's good," Clarke nods awkwardly. She taps her fingers against her knee as Bellamy examines a photo of her and her dad on her desk. "Um, when Octavia and I broke in to steal your scales back... Octavia said something about... people not normally... touching each other's scales? But uh, this was after I touched yours, I swear I didn't know - "  
  
"It's okay, Clarke," Bellamy says, giving her a small smile. It's hard to tell if he's blushing or not, but he doesn't seem upset about the fact that she was unknowingly groping him in front of his sister, so she'll let it drop. He turns his attention back to her desk, and she fiddles with her sleeves as he picks up the drawing she did of Raven - the one Tsing found on the fridge. Clarke took it down after she left, but the damage was already done. "Woah. Has Raven seen this? It's amazing."  
  
"I have something to tell you," Clarke says miserably, and something in her tone makes him makes set the drawing down and look at her, eyes steady and unwavering. "The scientist that had your scales - she's an old classmate of my mom's, and a few days after she came to Walden, Abby invited her over for dinner. That drawing was taped up on the fridge, and she saw it, and -"

She breaks off suddenly, sucking in a deep breath as she realizes she's about to cry. Clarke turns her head away determinedly so she can no longer see Bellamy staring at her, his face unreadable.

"And then she stole your scales. So it's my fault," she finishes miserably. "And if you want to be angry at me for that, then... Then I accept that."  
  
For a moment, he says nothing. Then Clarke feels the bed shift underneath his weight, and he's warm at her side, wrapping his arms around her shoulder and pulling her in close. Clarke turns, presses her cheek against the faded cotton of the most recent tshirt he's stolen from Lincoln, and breathes in the scent of the beach. So lightly she thinks she might imagine it, he presses a kiss to the top of her head.

"I told you if you ever put me or my clan in danger that I would drag you out to sea," Bellamy says softly, and Clarke can't help but stiffen. He strokes her hair with one hand, silently bidding her to let him finish. "I was wrong, Clarke. Everything you've done, you've done to keep us safe. Did you know I went to speak with our parent clan before I came home? They refused us. Won't lift a finger to help us or come within sight of Walden. But you walked straight into the lion's den and came right back out with my scales."  
  
"They wouldn't have been in the lion's den if Tsing hadn't seen my drawing," Clarke mutters.  
  
"That's bullshit," Bellamy replies. "She already knew she would find us here, somehow. She was already setting up her home in Walden, wasn't she? It's not your fault."  
  
"Fuck," Clarke groans, and buries her face deeper in his chest. All she wanted from this summer was to avoid her mom and Kane, get a cute tan, and then return to university without a backwards glance. She did not want to get involved in mermaid-and-evil-scientist conspiracies. "I'm still going to make up for it. I promise."  
  
"We'll keep them safe," Bellamy says, voice fierce, and Clarke doesn't doubt him. Eventually, they lean back and settle comfortably on Clarke's bed, legs tangled together, her head braced against the crook of his shoulder, and they fall asleep talking about defense - they're not willing to tear Lincoln and Octavia from their home if they can help it, and the other mermaids won't leave them behind, so instead they try to figure out a plan that will keep them all safe - buddy systems, curfew, the like.  
  
Just before dawn, Bellamy wakes Clarke up with open-mouthed kisses to her throat, and she lies back in a daze for a moment, her fingers curled loosely in his hair as he makes his way past her collarbone and down the valley between her breasts. Clarke whines when he stops at her sternum, unable to pull the neckline of her pajamas any further.

"This is why we don't wear clothes," Bellamy says cheekily, so Clarke takes off her shirt and hits him with it. She gasps when his tongue finds her navel and his fingers hook underneath the waistband of her shorts but don't pull any further. "May I?"  
  
"Go right ahead," Clarke murmurs, lifting her hips up so he can undress her completely.  
  
"I've never done this before," he says mildly, right before placing a feather-light kiss at the apex of her thighs. Clarke curls her fingers tighter in his hair.  
  
"You're kidding?" she says. In response he hums, and she shivers as his breath spills over her. "All right. I'll guide you."  
  
And she does. His enthusiasm more than makes up for the lack of experience, and it's kind of amazing. He's ruined her for human boys who hold no fascination with what they find in her pants. If she ever dates after this, she'll have to stick purely to people who actually appreciate going down on her.

"I don't feel like going to work today," Clarke whispers afterwards, while he's splayed out on her front, his head pillowed on her chest. Downstairs she can hear Abby bustling about the kitchen, and by the blinking red numbers on her alarm clock, it's time Clarke joined her too, but she's far too comfortable lounging back on her bed, stroking Bellamy's hair absentmindedly.  
  
He gives a quiet groan in response, and Clarke smirks at the knowledge that she's not the only one unwilling to part. Slowly, his head moves, and he presses a lazy kiss to her collarbone before turning to squint at her.

"If we don't go, Octavia will give us shit," he says.  
  
"Fair enough," Clarke says, shoving him off.  
  
Four days later, Jasper runs home screaming, and everything goes to hell.

 

 

.....................

 

 

  
"We put curfew into place for a reason," Bellamy says, pacing Lincoln's living room with all the fury of a caged tiger. His arms are crossed over his chest, his eyes dark and angry, and Jasper watches him wear a hole through the carpet with wide, red eyes.

"We just wanted to go for a night swim," Jasper says, his voice tiny, and Clarke has to remind herself that he and Harper are only fifteen, and Monty's only a year older than them. They're still just kids, and the severity of the situation hasn't sunk in even after they witnessed Bellamy nearly lose his scales forever. "It's been so long, we just wanted to have a little fun."  
  
"Your little fun might have gotten Monty and Harper _killed_ ," Miller says roughly. "Did you think about that?"  
  
Only Raven, reaching out and laying a warning hand on his shoulder, makes him tear his gaze away from the only one of the younger mermaids who came home tonight.  
  
"We can still fix this," Clarke says to Bellamy, but he doesn't stop in his pacing to look at her. She can practically see the gears in his head rolling, and knows that in a few minutes he'll realize he can't do this without her.  
  
"Lincoln," Bellamy says eventually, looking up at the silent giant of a man who sits at the kitchen bar, watching them all. "I need you to take Octavia and Jasper in your truck and get them out of here. Stick to the coast so Jasper can take water breaks. If we succeed, we'll call you and find a place to meet."  
  
"You can't make us leave," Octavia shouts, leaping up out of her seat and standing her brother down, feet spread wide and her hands clenched into fists at her side. "I won't do it."  
  
"O," Bellamy says, then breaks off, running a frustrated hand through his hair. He grabs Octavia's hand and pulls her outside onto the deck. Clarke can hear their argument through the glass door if she concentrates, but eavesdropping feels uncomfortable, and she turns instead to Raven and Miller.  
  
"You got a plan?" Raven asks, already all business, and Clarke hesitates before nodding.  
  
"I have a plan of a plan," Clarke says. She got into Tsing's facility once, didn't she? She can do it again. Only this time, they won't be able to just walk in on the pretense of visiting. Tsing's already marked both her and Octavia down as enemies, and besides, it's nighttime already. The only people at the facility now will be the ones working closely with Tsing, the ones who know what's really going on in the labs. No clueless gate operators or receptionists to deceive.  
  
A few minutes later, Bellamy and Octavia return inside. Clarke has no idea what he said to her, but Octavia's eyes are red and she puts up no fight before pulling Jasper and Lincoln upstairs to pack. Bellamy watches her storm up the stairs with sad eyes, and doesn't turn to Clarke until she's out of view.

"You're with us?" he asks, and she sees a flash of fear in his eyes before he manages to hide it.  
  
"Of course," Clarke says, and he stands up taller at that, like she's given him new strength.  
  
"All right," he says, motioning Raven and Miller closer. "How do we do this?"

 

 

.....................

 

 

Kane lives a few streets away from Abby, and Clarke recognizes his house easily enough by the ridiculous collection of potted plants he has on his porch. She thinks Kane might have grown up in a desert or something, because he's obsessed with tiny bonsai trees and other cute plants.

"You're sure about this?" Lincoln asks her quietly as he parks the truck on the darkened street in front of Kane's house.  
  
"Yes," Clarke responds, without a hint of hesitation. She leans forward abruptly and hugs him - it's an awkward fit considering she's leaned over the gearbox and forgot to unbuckle her seatbelt, but after a moment he relaxes and pats her shoulder gently. "Take care of Octavia."  
  
"I always have," he responds, voice minutely softer, and Clarke slips out of the truck just as the others start hopping out of the back. She's glad she doesn't have to tell any of them to be quiet, now that the danger they're in has finally sunk in.

Bellamy shadows Clarke as she digs her keyring out of her pocket and steps up to Kane's door, and she doesn't even have the energy left to shoo him off. She unlocks the door, eternally thankful that Kane tries as hard as he does to be welcoming and fatherly as possible and gave her and Abby both a key 'just in case', and they tiptoe inside. Clarke's only been to Kane's house once or twice for dinner, but she still remembers that he hung his car keys on a hook just inside the door, and carefully lifts them off the hook without letting them jingle.

In the kitchen, she finds a notepad with fancy _TO DO:_ calligraphy at the top, and takes a moment to figure out what she wants to write, while Bellamy fidgets in the background, obviously thinking she's wasting time by doing this.

_Kane,_

_I need your car. I'm so sorry, I know you just got it repaired (it looks beautiful by the way!!) after I smashed it up but my friends are in real, serious trouble and I've got to help them. Please don't declare your car stolen - I promise we'll try to return it in a few days if this goes well. Thanks for being awesome. You're never going to be my dad, but I think we can figure something else out. Again, sorry._

_Clarke._

She leaves it half-tucked under the fruit bowl and then spirits away with Bellamy.

"Don't crash the car," Clarke tells Lincoln as she tosses him the keys. "Seriously, it's Kane's baby, he'll bawl."  
  
"I'll do my best," Lincoln says, and Clarke swears that's sass she hears in his voice and - _was that an eye roll?_ Octavia's rubbing off on him.

Speaking of, the younger Blake stands in the driveway, not quite ready to climb into Kane's car just yet. She looks at Clarke for a moment, fierce and defiant as always, and then lurches forward to hug her.  
  
"You'll get them out of there, right?" Octavia asks, a little muffled. Her hands grab hold of the back of Clarke's shirt and tighten into fists, and Clarke sighs as she strokes Octavia's hair. "And you'll tell them I'm sorry I couldn't be there too?"  
  
"Of course," Clarke says. Octavia pulls away and gazes at her with the most heartbroken expression Clarke has ever seen on her face, and she must find whatever it is she's looking for because a moment later her chin juts out and she looks ready to take on the world again. It's funny, they started the summer as boss-and-employer, and now Clarke could consider her one of her best friends. She hopes she sees Octavia again, after all this.  
  
"Don't forget to tuck your thumb underneath," Octavia says, giving Clarke the barest hint of a smile, and then she steps past her and clambers into the passenger seat, relegating Jasper to the back. Clarke watches Kane's car drive away, Octavia's face pressed against the window until they're out of view, and breathes out shakily.  
  
"I wish we had a sweet ride too."  
  
She turns away from the street Lincoln and Octavia and Jasper vanished down to find Raven examining the truck with slightly less enthusiasm than she'd been eyeing Kane's vintage car with.

" _This_ sweet ride," Clarke says, patting the hood affectionately. "Is going to destroy anyone who stands in our way."  
  
"Time to go," Bellamy reminds them, and they pile back in.

"I hope I remember how to drive," Clarke mutters once she's behind the wheel by merit of being the only human on the team. Raven could probably figure it out, given about half an hour, but that's time they aren't willing to spend when they have no idea what Tsing is doing to Harper and Monty.  
  
"You don't know how to drive?" Bellamy asks, incredulous.  
  
"I do!" Clarke snaps back. "It's just been a while, okay? I didn't have to do it this summer, I jogged everywhere. Be quiet and let me concentrate."  
  
Luckily enough Lincoln's car doesn't have any nasty surprises for her, so she gets it on the road easily enough and they're silent as she zooms up the coastline road leading to Tsing's research facility.

"I should have kept closer watch on them," Bellamy says suddenly, just before they arrive.  
  
"It's not your fault," Clarke says automatically, squinting through the darkness in case a deer decides it has to cross the road, and it has to cross _now._  
  
"They're my clan, I'm supposed to - "  
  
"Bell," Clarke says desperately. "Please don't blame yourself. You did good."  
  
She dares to glance away from the road long enough to look at him, and he's staring straight ahead through the windshield, his eyes dark and pained, that familiar muscle jumping in his jaw that Octavia has too when she's upset. Clarke was pressing kisses to his neck not that long ago. She wishes none of this had happened, just so she wouldn't have to see her friends in such pain.

"Let's just get them out," he says roughly, and turns away. Clarke swallows hard and focuses her attention back on driving. In no time at all they're turning past the bend just before the facility, and her stomach feels sick as the truck's yellow headlights spill over the entrance sign. Most of the laboratory is dark and silent, except for a single room on the top floor whose windows glow bright and menacing.  
  
She slows to a stop in front of the bar that blocks her way into the parking lot and regards it carefully. After a few heartbeats she hears thumps from the back of the truck as Miller and Raven vault over the sides and walk to the bar. Clarke rolls her window down and sticks her head out to listen to them mutter as they circle the bar and struggle to push it up.

"Should I go help?" Bellamy asks, one hand already reaching for the latch of his door.  
  
"Nah," Clarke says, waving Raven and Miller out of the way. They take a stance on either side of the bar, as Clarke shifts the truck into reverse and backs up a few meters. She sets her jaw determinedly and puts the gear back into forward. "Hold on."

"Clarke - " Bellamy begins, but he doesn't have time to ask more because Clarke floors the acceleration and they hit the bar straight-on. Seconds after the bar crumples beneath the grate of Lincoln's monster truck, the impact makes Clarke lurch forward and hit her chest against the steering wheel. Obviously, the stupid old truck didn't think that crash was important enough to merit inflating the airbags.

Once they're through, Clarke takes a moment to just breathe through the sudden pain in her chest. She blinks away the daze and finds Bellamy doing the same at her side. Nothing's broken, at least.

"Some warning, next time," Bellamy says, sounding strangled as he pulls the seatbelt away from his chest and winces.  
  
"I did give you warning," Clarke mutters. "I said _hold on_."  
  
She parks the truck over two parking spaces, feeling absolutely not in the mood to obey parking courtesy, and Raven and Miller have already appeared once she slips out of the cab.

"Remind me never to piss you off," Raven says, already pulling down the back of the truck bed and reaching for the loot they stowed inside.  
  
"I wouldn't run you over. The world would be a sadder place without you." Clarke responds, hefting a baseball bat into her hands. The scratch at the head tells her this is the very same one she used to smash Kane's headlights in at the beginning of the summer. Oh, how the times have changed. She sobers as she sees Miller and Bellamy taking their own pick of her bats, both of them wearing hard expressions. Raven nudges her shoulder against Clarke's in a show of solidarity, and Clarke forces a smile in return.  
  
"Everyone ready?" Bellamy asks, and Clarke nods after she pulls a backpack full of gasoline canisters over her shoulder. It's heavy as hell, but she's gotten stronger this summer both by running religiously and by helping Lincoln carry surfboards and lounge chairs up and down the beach.  
  
"Let's blow this popsicle joint," Raven mutters, and she looks so pissed that Clarke lets her take the first swing at the elegant glass doors. For a moment after the baseball bat leaves a spiderweb of cracks the windows hang in suspension, then the second blow shatters them inwards with a satisfying crash. Alarms start blaring almost as soon as the glass showers against the floor, and Clarke sets the timer on her watch. She looks away as the seconds start ticking up rapidly.  
  
"Which way?" Bellamy asks, swinging his head back and forth to take in the darkened foyer. Every sense feels heightened with adrenaline as they step over the jagged remains of the doors and file into the reception.  
  
"The lab first," Clarke decides, remembering the fridge that Tsing stored Bellamy's scales in and setting off down the hall. "Then the rooms that were lit up upstairs."  
  
The facility is even creepier at night, the corridors lit up only by neon exit signs at each end and the occasional window letting moonlight cast pale rectangles over the linoleum floor. Over and over, the alarm blares, and Clarke feels their time ticking down.

The facility is far enough out from Walden that the police will take six minutes to get here. Six minutes to get in, find Monty and Harper and their scales if they've been separated, and get out. The gasoline is just a bonus she doesn't think they'll get to.

"In here, this is where I found Bellamy's scales," Clarke says over the alarms, gesturing to the door she hopes is the right one. It's locked, so Miller grits his teeth and smashes the window above the doorknob in so Raven, who has the smallest wrists, can reach in and open it. The door swings open and they drift in like ghosts, baseball bats at the ready, only to find it empty and dark. Clarke goes straight to the freezer, knowing Bellamy has her back.

Inside she finds Tsing's genetically modified tomatoes but nothing else. Even the box that held Bellamy's scales last time is gone.  
  
"Nothing here," Clarke says grimly, and they all move out at her lead, searching for a stairwell. Bellamy takes her baseball bat so he's wielding two now, and she takes out the first can of gasoline and starts dripping a strong-smelling trail behind them. In the moments of deafening silence between the blares of the alarm, she hears their footsteps thundering up the stairs. The higher they go, the more they sound to her like an entire army out for vengeance, rather than four teenagers with re-purposed sports equipment and three mermaid tails between them.  
  
Tsing is waiting in the fifth floor hallway when they run in. They freeze at the sight of her, but she's alone, holding a gun in two shaking hands.

"This is private property," she yells out. "You're trespassing, Clarke. Get out of here."  
  
"Not without my people," Clarke says, and her own voice half-surprises her. She sounds... terrifying. Powerful. Devoted.  
  
"Their genes could provide a breakthrough for modern medicine," Tsing argues. "You have no idea how long I've been trying to isolate the mermaid healing factor. Are you going to sacrifice the good of the many for only two children?"  
  
"Yes," Miller says through gritted teeth, apparently fed up with the discussion, because he storms forward and brings his baseball bat down on Tsing's hands before any of them can even blink. Tsing cries out in pain and loses her grip on the gun. Before she can recover, Miller kicks it towards Raven, who picks it up with a gleeful look that Clarke will worry about later.  
  
Bellamy, meanwhile, has moved past them all and shouldered open the door Tsing was guarding.

"I found them!" he yells, and Miller and Raven immediately follow behind, leaving Clarke to stand over Tsing. The doctor is still clutching her injured hands to her chest when she looks up at Clarke with barely-restrained spite in her eyes.  
  
"Do they have their scales with them?" Clarke demands.

"Yes. Are you happy?" Tsing asks, spitting the words at her. "Years and years of my work, gone down the drain."  
  
"Not down the drain," Clarke corrects, raising the empty gasoline canister. "I think the correct term is _up in flames_."  
  
Tsing's eyes widen when she sees it, and her eyes flicker between it and Clarke's face rapidly.

"No," she croaks. "No, you can't do this."  
  
"Watch me," Clarke growls, and just then, the mermaids stumble out of the laboratory. Harper and Monty are both pale and shaken, dressed in flimsy hospital gowns and clutching at their scales like lifelines - which Clarke supposes is not an entirely inaccurate comment to make - but she's relieved to see they appear to be unharmed, other than the fact that they're leaning on Bellamy and Miller respectively to be able to stand up.  
  
"We're ready to go," Bellamy says to Clarke, sparing Tsing only a single, disgusted look. Clarke nods curtly and hangs back as the others start towards the stairwell. She checks her watch. Five minutes in.  
  
"I'd get out of the building if I were you," Clarke says to Tsing, and then she turns, following her friends down the stairs.  
  
Tsing stumbles out into the parking lot just as they've tossed their baseball bats into the truck bed and everyone's helping Harper and Monty up. Clarke can hear the wail of sirens in the distance and it makes her heart pound in her chest, _ba-bump ba-bump ba-bump_. There's no time left for second thoughts.

"You're making a mistake," Tsing says, taking up stance in front of the shattered remains of her very modern and profession and very broken glass doors. Even now, she refuses to believe she's in the wrong.  
  
Clarke looks at her, looks back at the truck where her friends are anxiously waiting, Miller banging on the side of the truck bed and yelling at her to hurry up, and she decides she can't leave Tsing's laboratories standing for the next unwitting mermaid to be dragged into. She pulls her matchbox out of her pocket, strikes three at a time, and tosses them into the dark stain of gasoline just inside the doors. Tsing's resounding shriek as the reception area suddenly blazes with a bright orange inferno echoes in Clarke's ears as she sprints for the truck and climbs into the driver's seat.

"If we go through the entrance they'll block us off," Bellamy says tersely as Clarke turns the key in the ignition so quickly that the truck's engine sputters instead of starting. She forces herself to pull the key out and try again. Her hands are shaking.  
  
"Then we won't go through the entrance," Clarke says, reversing the truck quickly. "Tell everyone to hold on."  
  
Bellamy has just enough time to stick his head out the window and yell a warning to everyone in the truckbed before Clarke slams on the acceleration for the second time this night - this time, headed straight for a rusty portion of the fence that encircles the parking lot. At the very last minute the chain-links loom up in front of the windshield and she thinks it won't work, and then the fence gives under the truck's momentum and they ride free out onto a patchy grass field, the chainlink metal groaning under the tires. Tsing's laboratory is a flaming smudge in her rearview mirror.

The sirens are painfully loud now, but Clarke will have to worry about that later. She turns the truck onto the road and speeds in the opposite direction away from the flashing blue and red lights on the dark horizon. Oh god, Abby's gonna kill her.

"We're not heading towards Walden," Bellamy comments, arching his neck to look backwards. "Clarke, what's the plan?"  
  
"Have to stay ahead of the cops," Clarke replies breathlessly. "What's the closest beach I can reach by car north of here?"  
  
"Azgeda," Bellamy replies instantly. "The entrance is hard to find, it'll buy us a few minutes."  
  
"Perfect," Clarke answers, flexing her hands on the steering wheel. In the moonlight that spills over the cab, her knuckles are stark white from the force she's holding on with. She tries to loosen her grip and finds that she can't, all her instincts kicked into overdrive with the pure adrenaline racing through her.  
  
She chokes down a sob as Bellamy tersely directs her down the coast, and they pull up onto a gravel stretch along the road that leads into a sandy beach. Miller and Raven leap out of the truck bed before Clarke's even turned off the engine, and they're already helping Monty and Harper down when she exits.

"Come on, come on," Clarke says, looking down the road where she expects the police cruises to appear any second. They'll have noticed them fleeing from the scene, and it won't take long for Tsing to cast accusations. There's no time left.

"You'll be in trouble for helping us, won't you?" Monty asks as they stumble down the sand.  
  
"Doesn't matter," Clarke says fiercely, shaking her head. "Don't worry about that, okay? I'll deal with it."  
  
"Thank you," Harper says, her voice tiny and frightened. She looks so small wrapped up in one of the spare towels she must have found in the back of the truck.  
  
"Just go," Clarke urges, glancing over her shoulder as the distant wail of sirens grows closer. "Please."  
  
And they do, discarding their beachwear on the beach and wading out into the ocean's shallows. One by one they wrap their scales around themselves and vanish into the water, appearing moments as tiny specks in the distance, their heads bobbing with the waves. And then only Bellamy is left, and he gives Clarke the most torn look she's ever seen on a person.

"Clarke - " he says, breaking off, and she steps forward and kisses him fiercely before one of them cries. He responds instantly, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her against him, his mouth opening with a quiet sigh. The sirens only get louder, and Clarke wants to hate them for not giving them more time.  
  
She forces herself to pull away and drinks in what might be the last glimpse she gets of Bellamy - mussed hair and parted lips, a heartbreak written in the shadows of his face.  
  
"Go," Clarke says, because all her life she has let the things she loves go with the belief they'll eventually return to her. Her father wasn't the first, and Bellamy won't be the last.

But instead of diving into the water with the others, he pulls something out of his pocket and presses it into her hands. It's cool and smooth to the touch, but Clarke doesn't get a chance to see what it is before he forces her fingers to curl around it, keeping it safe.

"Don't forget about me," he says, and kisses her one last time, a quick, stolen kiss, before the police cruisers pull up on the gravel at the crest of the beach and he turns, sprinting into the water with his scales in hand.  
  
Like she could ever forget.

Clarke stands at the water's edge for several moments her eyes fixed on the last place she saw her mermaids, waves lapping gently at her toes as though the ocean is apologizing for taking them away from her. She hears footsteps in the sand, stomping towards her, but doesn't turn until they grab her arms and pull her away from the water.

She's pushed into the back of a cruiser, not cruelly but certainly not without a disappointed firmness, and once the car starts moving, Clarke slowly opens her hand. Resting on her palm is a single, beautiful seashell. The officer driving the car tilts his rearview mirror to look at her when she lets out a sudden sob, but says nothing.

 

 

.....................

 

  
  
  
"I don't understand, Clarke," Abby says to her as they take the bus home from the police station, because normally Abby gets a ride from Kane whenever they have errands to run, but now Kane is sitting on her mother's other side, the note in which Clarke apologizes for stealing his car neatly tucked in his breastpocket. It's five am and this is the very first bus running, so they have it entirely to themselves.  
  
Clarke keeps quiet and kicks at the empty seat in front of her, feeling like a toddler chastised for a tantrum. Being arrested isn't anything like she thought it would be. She's spent the early hours of the morning giving one-word answers to cops that kept plying her with coffee and questions, and she's not even entirely sure how Abby managed to convince them to release her without charge - something about no previous criminal record, and the fact that Tsing isn't pressing charges for what happened on her private property, and Abby's prestige in Walden as the head surgeon at the local hospital. Her detention is still going on her record, unfortunately. Clarke wonders what her university will have to say about that.

She doesn't want to think about it.

"How about we start with the trouble you said your friends were in," Kane says tactically, pulling out the letter Clarke left on his kitchen counter. "Does this have to do with the fire?"  
  
"It's a long story and you won't believe any of it," Clarke mutters, turning away. The worst part is that they aren't even that angry at her - she's sure Abby must have been when she was first called down to the police station, but Clarke didn't get to see her until a few hours after she'd finished yelling at everyone in the station, and she'd calmed down a little by then. No, the worst part is that they're both so genuinely confused and concerned, and that they're _doing it in unison_. It's like they're married already. Clarke doesn't resent Kane, most days, but the synchronization he has with her mother now is just making things even worse.  
  
She's tired, she wants to be home already, she wants Octavia to call her and tell her they've made it safely to some sketchy motel and then complain about the lack of good channels on tv until Clarke falls asleep with the phone cradled to her ear. She wants Jasper and Monty to draw tiny penises on her arms while she's sleeping, and Miller to roll his eyes when he catches them in the act, and Raven to steal the marker from them and poke Clarke until she wakes up and agrees to draw robot joints on her hands.

And most of all, she wants Bellamy, who wouldn't try to talk about it, but would swim out with her and wait until she'd taken her frustration out on the waves.

How can she already miss them all so much?

"We're talking after you wake up," Abby says sternly as they get home and Clarke slinks up to her bedroom.  
  
"Yeah," Clarke replies, but she doesn't go to sleep right away, even though her eyelids are practically closing on their own. She sits in the corner underneath the window Bellamy crawled in through just earlier this week, and she sketches every one of them before she forgets the curve of their smiles and the way their muscles moved under their skin, every one of them sleek and powerful both in and out of the water.  
  
It's funny that after an entire summer she's spent struggling to put pencil to paper, finally, this was the trigger she needed to let all the pent up emotion inside of her flow out her fingers. Clarke shoves her sketchbook under her bed afterwards and crawls into bed before her tears can soak the pages. She finally nods off clutching Bellamy's seashell tightly.

 

 

.....................

 

 

 

"Mom?" Clarke says reluctantly the next day.  
  
Abby is straining spinach salad over the sink, and she glances over at Clarke as she dumps the salad into a larger bowl.

"Yes, honey?" she asks, a little distracted by her tasks in the kitchen. Clarke leans against the doorway and thinks about the words she wants to say.  
  
"I... I can't tell you everything that happened this summer," Clarke begins hesitantly. "Because some parts aren't my secrets to tell. But I think you should know some of it. And you need to know that Tsing isn't the person you thought she was. She was doing something really bad, really cruel in her labs, and I did what I had to do to stop it."  
  
Abby turns to face Clarke completely, her face a myriad of emotions that Clarke can't even begin to name.

"Clarke..." she begins, but then falls silent and listens as Clarke tells her what happened in halting sentences, trying to think ahead of her words so she knows what to censor and what's safe to say. The worried furrow between Abby's eyebrows never leaves as she speaks. At the end of it all, Abby leans back against the counter and sighs heavily.  
  
"If Lorelai knows she can't get you back through the law without calling herself into question," she says after a long moment, "Then you'll have to leave town. You're not safe in Walden if she's as devoted to her work as you say she is. I'll call Thelonious and see if he minds having you stay in the poolhouse for the rest of the summer."  
  
"I'm sorry about..." Clarke trails off, waving her hands vaguely in the air. Truthfully she's not entirely sure what she's apologizing for, only that she wishes it had all ended differently.  
  
"Don't be," Abby says, surprising Clarke. "I'm glad we got to spend time with each other. And you seemed happier this summer. It's a good look on you, honey."  
  
Clarke nods sharply and then looks down at her socks because the soft look on her mother's face is giving her all sorts of feelings Clarke thought she'd gotten rid of after she first learned about the divorce. The awareness of how much she's actually going to miss her mom surprises her, and she lurches forward with the weight of it and embraces Abby so she doesn't see her face.

"It's going to be okay," Abby whispers, gently stroking Clarke's hair, and Clarke squeezes her eyes shut so she doesn't cry and dares to hope she'll be right.

 

 

.....................

 

  
  
  
Three weeks later, Clarke is helping Wells pack for university. He's studying political science and Clarke really hopes he gets elected to something important in twenty or thirty years because he's one of the few people she could see genuinely doing good in positions of power.

They're leaving for university in just a few days and Wells is stressed not about packing school supplies, or clothes, or other knickknacks. No, Clarke is helping him pack _biographies._

"This is ridiculous," Clarke declares, looking between the first shelf that Wells has picked his way through, and the cardboard box at her feet that they've only barely managed to tape shut. Its corners are bursting with the tension of keeping so many books inside.  
  
"These are important," Wells insists, sitting on his library floor surrounded by towers of biographies - the ones to be packed on his left, the ones to be left home on his right. "How could I possibly leave home without the memoirs of Nelson Mandela? Or Steve Jobs? Or Obama? Come on Clarke, could you be so cruel as to make me leave Obama here? He'll get lonely!"  
  
"Fine, pack Obama," Clarke says, kicking the next empty box his way. "Then can we have lunch?"  
  
She's distracted from his response by the vibration of her phone in her pocket. Clarke pulls it out and sees that it's an email notification from an unknown sender. There's no subject line, and the email's text is nothing but a series of seemingly random numbers and letters, followed by the equals sign a dozen times as though the sender was trying very hard to backspace and couldn't quite manage it.

And then she notices there's a video attached.

Clarke ducks out of the library, leaving Wells to ponder Margaret Thatcher - he's apparently very conflicted on her policies, though he admires her work ethic - and presses play in a quiet room. The video starts and Clarke sees only blurs until whoever's filming finally keeps the camera still and lets it focus on Raven and Monty's smiling faces. Her heart skips a beat in her chest.

"Hi Clarke!" Monty says happily, and a hand with pink nail polish that looks like it belongs to Octavia squeezes into the frame and waves excitedly. A chorus of background voices also greet her, and the camera pans around quickly to show everyone. Their voices and faces are tiny, coming out of her phone, but Clarke feels the warmest she has in three weeks.  
  
"Lincoln brought us something called a go-pro, and apparently we can take it with us underwater so we're going to play with it!" Raven tells her, and then half her face gets cut by the camera's frame as Harper elbows her way into the screen.  
  
"Clarke where are you?" Harper asks, leaning in so close to the lens that for a moment Clarke sees only her eyes, big and curious. "We really hope you can see this video. We miss you a lot!"  
  
"Stop hogging the go-pro," she hears Jasper say, voice muffled, and the next thirty seconds of video are just blurry hands fighting over the camera, before Miller manages to grab it and strikes a triumphant pose, complete with an exaggerated duck-face and two fingers raised up in the peace sign, before tossing the go-pro forward.  
  
Clarke feels a slow smile spread on her lips as she gets a glimpse of dark curls and a familiar sun-browned face before the camera dives underwater. As she watches him swim further and further out, her grin gets wider until her cheeks start to hurt. A few minutes into the video he reaches a coral reef and slows to circle it, showing her gently waving seaweed patches and all sorts of colorful fish that appear completely unafraid of him. Clarke gasps as she sees him stretch out a hand and two tiny silver fish descend to nibble at his fingertips.

She slides down the wall she's been leaning against until she's sitting at the base, and doesn't take her eyes away from the screen once. After several minutes of the coral reef, he turns the camera upwards and she watches as the view zooms towards the surface of the water, bright and undulating above them. Clarke's never known the ocean could look so inviting and peaceful.

The go-pro breaks the surface, and Clarke hears him sputter off-camera for a moment before he turns it around to face him.

"Hey stranger," Bellamy says, grinning at her. He's so beautiful even in her pixelated little video that Clarke puts one hand over her mouth and tries to physically stop herself from smiling because her cheeks hurt so much. "I hope you liked a little slice of mermaid life."  
  
"I do, Bellamy," she says softly, even knowing there's no way he'll hear.  
  
"It's really nice where we are," he continues, tilting the camera so she can see a pale beach in the distance behind him, underneath a bright blue sky with only a hint of fluffy clouds. "We usually head down here for the winter anyway, so we figured we'd make the trip a little early this year. Not sure if we can come back to Walden for a while, but then again, not sure you'll be able to hang around there either. We'll have to find somewhere else to meet."  
  
"I knew I should have gone to art school," Clarke mutters, thinking of the coastal arts university she turned down for a chance at the excellent pre-med program at landlocked Ark U.  
  
"We miss you," Bellamy says, his voice a little quieter as he turns the camera back to him. "I miss you. I hope you still have my seashell. It's not much but... Anyway, Octavia's helping me set up something called an email. I'm not entirely sure how the email works, but I'll figure it out soon enough. If you want to keep in touch... I'll be here. And if not, thank you... For everything."

"You ridiculous merman," Clarke says as he presses two fingers to his lips and holds them out to the camera, grinning cheekily in the background the whole while.  
  
"All right, bye for now. Everyone's yelling at me to bring the go-pro back. I love you, Clarke," he says, and then the video ends.  
  
Wells finds her a few minutes later, still sitting in the same position, her arms loosely curled around her knees as she remembers the past summer.

"What's up?" he asks, lowering the two autobiographies he was apparently just about to ask her opinion on. "You okay?"  
  
"Yeah," Clarke says hoarsely, and then passes her phone to him so he can see the video too. He watches carefully, even when Bellamy starts getting sappy, and Clarke tries to gauge his quiet calm as he hands her phone back.  
  
"So," Wells says after a minute. He looks at her and unexpectedly smirks. "You're going long distance and steady with a hot mermaid?"  
  
"Shut up," Clarke says, shoving him in the shoulder hard enough that he falls over and complains for the next ten minutes. Her smile doesn't fade the rest of the day, and she finds that she doesn't quite mind listening to Wells debate about Abraham Lincoln as they finish packing. That night they attend a bonfire with a group of their high school friends, and Clarke wants to stand up on top of a lawn chair and tell them all about Octavia and Bellamy and Raven and the others. She's filled with so much adoration for them all that she doesn't know how she holds it all in.

But later, as she and Wells stumble home with their arms slung over each other's necks, a little giggly and more than a little tipsy, Clarke thinks that as far as secrets go, this is one she'll enjoy for a long time. Tomorrow, she'll order a better webcam, and they'll see what comes of this.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Belligerent fishman phrase borrowed from ms_scarlet because she used it in a comment and I loved it too much to pass up.  
> I did not set out to write this with the intention of having Clarke set an entire building on fire at the end, but look what happened anyway! Go big or go home. It's not one of my fics unless something explodes.  
> I do my best to actively research everything I write about, to the point where I joined a sailboat competition this summer so I could put more detail into the epilogue, but I draw the line at getting myself arrested for the sake of accurate fanfiction. Nope. Sorry. If all that seems very wishy-washy to you, #yolo.  
> The epilogue is set a year after this, and it's all fluff! Pure fluff. Maybe some more mythical creatures showing up. 
> 
> If anyone's keeping up with my dramatic love life, I feel the need to inform you that I have since made out with the ex in question, several times, because we're dumb. I should stick to fanfiction instead, much easier.  
> By the way if you post a lot of the 100 feel free to leave your tumblr url in your comment, because I'm relatively new to the fandom and I need friends. I can't promise I'll follow everyone but I will check you out. You should definitely follow me, I'll be posting a lot of sneak peeks at other Bellarke wips to come.


End file.
